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Post by drbill on Sept 25, 2019 10:58:57 GMT -6
Back up your BOOT drive too!!
I meticulously back up my work drives every day before powering down, but have been remiss about backing up my boot drive because it really doesn't change much.
But I got bit. Spent the last 2 days sifting through computer issues, to figure out what went wrong. I had a huge lightning strike very close on Monday morning - and it took out my PT tower. It presented like a hardware failure, and that's how we proceed to investigate because of the lightning. It was fierce and radical, even though I have building wide protection, legit grounding via copper rods, a SurgeX Powerframe sub panel, and Furman AC Line Regulation for the computers.
My tech and I spent quite awhile troubleshooting. Final outcome was the the OS on the boot drive got totally scrambled. 25+ years of computers and Ive never had that happen. Luckily, I salvaged everything, but it took longer than it should.
Back up those drives! I'm going to try to be more careful now. I'm also setting up a backup redundant system, cause I can't really be down like this.
I did get off easier than one of my neighbors though. They had lightning hit and tear off the top of their roof, then burn their house down to the ground.
Lightning is fun, but it's pretty terrifying when it's so close. BTW, we have all underground power and phone delivery too. Didn't help much....
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Post by chessparov on Sept 25, 2019 11:50:32 GMT -6
Sorry to hear that happened.
But glad you were able to salvage things.
Chris
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Post by Guitar on Sept 25, 2019 12:03:36 GMT -6
I've been through it recently as well. I figure once every 1-2 years is "fine." You gotta roll with the punches. You got a chance to update all your software as well so in some ways it's a fresh start.
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Post by svart on Sept 25, 2019 12:16:31 GMT -6
Back up your BOOT drive too!! I meticulously back up my work drives every day before powering down, but have been remiss about backing up my boot drive because it really doesn't change much. But I got bit. Spent the last 2 days sifting through computer issues, to figure out what went wrong. I had a huge lightning strike very close on Monday morning - and it took out my PT tower. It presented like a hardware failure, and that's how we proceed to investigate because of the lightning. It was fierce and radical, even though I have building wide protection, legit grounding via copper rods, a SurgeX Powerframe sub panel, and Furman AC Line Regulation for the computers. My tech and I spent quite awhile troubleshooting. Final outcome was the the OS on the boot drive got totally scrambled. 25+ years of computers and Ive never had that happen. Luckily, I salvaged everything, but it took longer than it should. Back up those drives! I'm going to try to be more careful now. I'm also setting up a backup redundant system, cause I can't really be down like this. I did get off easier than one of my neighbors though. They had lightning hit and tear off the top of their roof, then burn their house down to the ground. Lightning is fun, but it's pretty terrifying when it's so close. BTW, we have all underground power and phone delivery too. Didn't help much.... I cloned my boot/OS drive once I got everything installed and running. I ended up cloning to a SSD after a few years but also later cloned it again to yet another SSD recently as the first SSD is a 1st generation one which tends to wear out after 5 years or so and has no monitoring so it'll eventually start to error out and fail in the next couple years. The better quality SSDs come with cloning software, so it's really easy to do and it's better than "backups" since you can just pop the new drive in and keep going without having to restore stuff. |
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Post by drsax on Sept 25, 2019 19:10:26 GMT -6
Back up your BOOT drive too!! Yes yes yes!!! Happened to me once years ago also from lighting strike. I clone my boot drive and backup to the cloud and or a drive that is not connected about once every couple weeks. Sorry you had to go through this drbill - no fun  |
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Post by cyrano on Sept 25, 2019 19:30:16 GMT -6
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Post by drbill on Sept 25, 2019 22:08:53 GMT -6
yes!!! Cheese Grater, 5.1, 10.10.5. That is strange. Mine has different symptoms - boot starts then computer shuts down mid-boot, but it sure seems coincidental. Thanks for the link!! |
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Post by drbill on Sept 25, 2019 22:13:05 GMT -6
Back up your BOOT drive too!! Yes yes yes!!! Happened to me once years ago also from lighting strike. I clone my boot drive and backup to the cloud and or a drive that is not connected about once every couple weeks. Sorry you had to go through this drbill - no fun Thanks drsax! You are smarter than I am.  But I'm trying to catch up!!! Yeah, super stressful. Stressful enough that I'm building another cheese grater with the latest / greatest to put into "storage" in case this ever happens again and the hardware goes. We get some hellacious lightning / thunderstorms here. The thought of being without the heart of the studio is almost terrifying. What have we become in this internet / computer age..... I DID have a boot backup, but for some reason it wouldn't boot the computer, which pushed us in a completely different investigative tact. Turns out though that the OS just got hopelessly scrambled. Enough so that it just shut the computer down. Anyway, I'm going to do this more often than once every 2 years. LOL |
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Post by mrholmes on Sept 25, 2019 23:38:39 GMT -6
Back up your BOOT ..... My tech and I spent quite awhile troubleshooting. Final outcome was the the OS on the boot drive got totally scrambled. 25+ years of computers and Ive never had that happen. Luckily, I salvaged everything, but it took longer than it should. Back up those drives! I'm going to try to be more careful now. I'm also setting up a backup redundant system, cause I can't really be down like this... Thats why I use two back up systems. Time Machine which is a dream if you just let the damn thing run without touching it ever. And in case the house burns down I use Backblaze which runs all the time in the background. www.backblaze.com/ |
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Post by trakworxmastering on Sept 26, 2019 9:20:42 GMT -6
I have Carbon Copy Cloner software set to automatically make a bootable copy of my system HD and my session HD onto another drive overnight every night. And I sleep well.
Gotta try out Backblaze - looks great - so I'll sleep even better!
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Post by Deleted on Sept 26, 2019 17:21:45 GMT -6
I had such an emergency case with a boot drive, SSD first generation, and another one with a second generation SSD, and could barely manage to rescue the system with a clone software right before the old drives refused to boot at all. First thought, it was some strange driver error or the mainboard might have reached end of life and produces errors ... With the first drive, a SMART parameter reading program identified the drive as good. With a drive health of 60% !?!?!? Maaan....
I am talking a Windows system, and I have a lot of custom settings and custom stuff, drivers for all kind of older hardware, utilities etc.pp... I know it can take weeks to get everything like this from a fresh installation of the OS.
Now, I was thinking of a "universal backup/restore", meaning that the system clone should be able to boot even on a different motherboard. Because - in case of a failure of the board, I would most probably not be able to get the same one again, and buying an old motherboard type used would be just a matter of time to have the problem again.
So I researched and found the AOMEI backupper, that claimed to be able to do exactly this with a windows boot drive. But before I could make the backup, a few days later, the Windows Defender antivirus identified the software as Trojan. Well, it is a chinese company and the english docs are more like done with Google translate...
Not sure about it beeing a false positive or not. Hrmmmmm.
Still no sufficient solution for the problem for me.
Nowadays, I tend to think more worst case than in the past. Too often I suffered from power problems destroying parts of a computer, and once even almost everything in a computer, PSU, mainboard, all cards and drives. Desaster stuff because of a badly educated electrician working on the wrong power line in the house, got mine instead of the neighbors one. D'Oh.
Data and system storage, backups that you can actually restore (you won't believe how many backups are not recoverable even in a large company IT systems....) - always something to have in mind, even if you think you are safe already...
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Post by cyrano on Sept 27, 2019 17:45:14 GMT -6
yes!!! Cheese Grater, 5.1, 10.10.5. That is strange. Mine has different symptoms - boot starts then computer shuts down mid-boot, but it sure seems coincidental. Thanks for the link!! If it turns off mid boot, I'd suspect the power supply. Especially with lightning happening. Just like the G5 before, the PSU is what fails first in these machines. And when you consider their current age, it's not even premature... |
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Post by drbill on Sept 27, 2019 18:33:00 GMT -6
yes!!! Cheese Grater, 5.1, 10.10.5. That is strange. Mine has different symptoms - boot starts then computer shuts down mid-boot, but it sure seems coincidental. Thanks for the link!! If it turns off mid boot, I'd suspect the power supply. Especially with lightning happening. Just like the G5 before, the PSU is what fails first in these machines. And when you consider their current age, it's not even premature... Yeah, that's what we suspected, but as I mentioned earlier, it wasn't ANY of the hardware. The OS software became completely scrambled. A fresh install of the OS right over the top of the old one fixed everything. Lucky on my end. If you can view 40 hours of hell lucky.... LOL |
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Post by cyrano on Sept 28, 2019 9:09:23 GMT -6
How did you conclude it wasn't hardware?
I'm sitting next to a G5 that works, if you can get it to boot. Usually, it'll switch off while booting. If you use it for a few hours, it'll happily boot every time after that. If you don't use it for more than a week, the misery starts again.
I know it's the PSU, but it took the owner months to realise I might be right when I told him.
Now, a G5 isn't worth repairing. A 2nd hand PSU is around 120 €. A new one is even more, if i could find one. So it's not economical. I can buy a working G5 for less.
But a Mac Pro is still worth the effort, in my eyes. Even a 1,1.
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Post by drbill on Sept 28, 2019 10:47:46 GMT -6
How did you conclude it wasn't hardware? . It wouldn't boot for at least 50X's after the incident. Then after finally re-installing the OS, it's booted perfectly ever since. Seems pretty obvious to me, but sometimes, there are multiple things going on. Time will tell. |
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Post by johneppstein on Sept 29, 2019 13:35:05 GMT -6
There's a thread over at PRW about this. It seems that they screwed up the code on the new version of Google Updater and it scrambles the OS on a certain range of Cheesgraters that don't have a particular setting enabled. This is a setting that is not compatible with certain audio programs in particular but not limited to a version or versions of ProTools. I'm neither a Mac nor a PT guy, so it you want details I'd recommend the thread at PRW.
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Post by Cyrus Melchor on Sept 30, 2019 16:55:27 GMT -6
I have a Glyph Studio drive and it failed six months after the 3 year warranty expired. I got pretty pissy, deemed them pretty to look at but not worth the dough. Then I put on my foil hat and presumed they had a life cycle of just outside of the warranty term. I ranted a little about it on twitter and then they reached out to me and told me to send it in for repair. The drive itself had indeed failed but were able to rescue ALL of the data. They then transferred it onto a brand new drive, put it neatly back into the enclosure and sent it back to me in 2 weeks. Stellar job, stellar service and it made me feel that they are worth the price of admission. So, basically, I'm giving a shout out to Glyph. I'll definitely buy again.
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But I'm trying to catch up!!! Yeah, super stressful. Stressful enough that I'm building another cheese grater with the latest / greatest to put into "storage" in case this ever happens again and the hardware goes. We get some hellacious lightning / thunderstorms here. The thought of being without the heart of the studio is almost terrifying. What have we become in this internet / computer age.....
