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I think I’ve finally found out what has been causing the bizarre hangs that my new computer has been experiencing. It turns out that Western Digital has a Firmware Update for my hard drive to fix what is, in essence, an infinite loop within their on-board diagnostic routines.

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The most unfortunate part is that the symptoms of the problem in this writeup are not very clear. At work, we call these write-ups APARs, and writing poor APARs is one of the worst things a technician can do. I now have a good sense of what our customers must go through.

One thing I like about Linux and other pieces of open source software is error reporting.

Recently my console has been displaying the following errors at startup:


ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
ata1.00: cmd ef/05:fe:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/40 tag 0 cdb 0x0 data 0
res 51/04:fe:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/40 Emask 0x1 (device error)
ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133
ata1: EH complete


This is gibberish to most everyone, and it doesn’t cause a problem, so I ignored it until I got bored today.

I clearly have a ton of information here… I just have no idea what it means. So, being pedantic, I went to the source: the ATA Command Set

Command x’EF’ is “Set Features”
SubCommand x’05′ is “Enable Advanced Power Management”
Setting x’FE’ is “Full Performance”

So it looks like my system is trying to set my hard drive in high performance mode. And from the return codes, my hard drive doesn’t like being told what to do.

I’m still not sure what part of the OS caused these messages to start appearing, but now I’ve got a good idea where to check. This obnoxious power-save daemon has acted up before. I guess it is time to finally get it configured properly.

This post is for anyone else getting this error who isn’t anal-retentive enough to go look up the ATA specification.

Many people have been pestering me to get my weblog back up and running since I’ve gotten my new server up and running. I really had no idea how many people actually read this thing… get a life people!

This weekend I decided to finally sit down and attempt a massive data recovery of the old server. Fortunately for me, the dead hard-disk wasn’t as utterly dead as I had thought and managed to let me extract most of my historic wordpress database without issue. I also managed to save all of my pictures from my trip around the world, which can now be found in my gallery.

I did all of this without having to stick the hard drive in the freezer! (I really was looking forward to that though.) If you are lucky, I’ll tell you how I managed to extract the bad data and use some hardcore Linux tools to read and correct the bad sectors on the disk.

Finally, along with the gallery came the massive amounts of comment spam in the buffers. I’m going to try to clean those out and re-implement the “captcha” so they stop coming… I might even use CMU’s newfangled one which helps decode electronic books.

Don’t wait for me to finish the rest of the website… thats a long way away. And don’t hold your breath for more blog posts, I’m pretty tired.

Today Adam, Jen, Devaki, and Jan helped me move my furniture from storage into the new apartment. 1/3 of the move is complete.

While I sat on the floor assembling my new cocktail and side tables, I realized that the new place was definitely growing on me. It all goes together quite well, and I think I’ll like it there.

Even the naughty and lascivious two person shower has a certain charm to it!

Since I know you’ve all been waiting for pictures, you can find them after the jump.

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