NP: Mike Keneally, Boil That Dust Speck

More hardware fun at the homestead lately. I've been stunningly unable to successfully back up my main hard drive since my forced conversion to the religion of, well, backing up your hard drive. Something about "delayed write failures" when confronted with fairly large data transfers. I called IOGear, who makes the drives, and all they had by way of suggestion was to switch from FireWire to USB.

So I do that, but didn't reboot the machine until last night. At which point I got the peculiar message "CPU Fan Error!" during startup. I bypass that, and then the machine won't boot at all. I eventually figured out on my own that seeing the external drives via USB instead of FireWire had tripped up the BIOS, so I fixed that. Despite the fan message, I seemed to be up and running. First thing I did was fire off an e-mail to EndPCNoise to see what the heck was going on with this bizarre fan message. They got back to me within an hour to say that there's a setting that checks the fan, but because of the way they build their machines, that sensor would get tripped when it shouldn't be, so it's normally turned off. In the upheaval that changed all my BIOS settings, it must have reset to the default.

So I figure, what the heck, let's see if they can help with the delayed write failure thing. Sure enough, I've gotten a better answer from them than from the IOGear guy. As much as I bitch about tech problems -- and Norton Ghost, you may be getting yours soon -- I feel it's only fair to report on the good stuff, too. Especially since it alleviated another one of those impulses to throw anything with a plug out the window.

I'm sort of looking forward to moving so I can dismantle this whole system and put it back together a bit more cleanly.