Crash! Boom!
May 27-29, 2005
I tried to create a data disk, copying files to a firewire-connected external hard drive. Hard to think of this as a stress test, but this Alienware computer froze during the copy. When I restarted the system, I got a message that the RAID set was incomplete. I pressed F4 during the boot, attempted to rebuild the RAID set, and got the random characters on the screen that we got several times when we initially configured the RAID. The system appeared to lock. I gave it an hour to see what would happen, hit reset, got the RAID message again, ignored it, ran CHKDISK and got no apparent errors on the drive.
I was making this disk as part of my development of a set of diagnostics, so that I could know / remember what to test for when this lemon came back from Alienware (they were going to do me the "favor" of troubleshooting and repair at their factory instead of providing onsite support). I wasn't comfortable working with a bad-RAID computer, but there was no other way to get the diagnostics, so I continued copying files to a USB (instead of firewire) drive and running tests. Several more problems showed up with Premiere Pro, with the Matrox card, and with Windows Media Player. Also, the RAID failure message came up sometimes when I booted and sometimes not. Like so many of the other problems on this system, this failure was intermittent.
Intermittent multivendor problems are a nightmare to diagnose, fix, and then retest. The testing problem is that if you partially fix an intermittent problem, it often doesn't go away, it just happens less often. So we could send this computer back to Alienware, they could "fix" it in good faith, do some basic diagnostics, and ship back a machine that still fails in the same ways, just less often.
I tried to create a data disk, copying files to a firewire-connected external hard drive. Hard to think of this as a stress test, but this Alienware computer froze during the copy. When I restarted the system, I got a message that the RAID set was incomplete. I pressed F4 during the boot, attempted to rebuild the RAID set, and got the random characters on the screen that we got several times when we initially configured the RAID. The system appeared to lock. I gave it an hour to see what would happen, hit reset, got the RAID message again, ignored it, ran CHKDISK and got no apparent errors on the drive.
I was making this disk as part of my development of a set of diagnostics, so that I could know / remember what to test for when this lemon came back from Alienware (they were going to do me the "favor" of troubleshooting and repair at their factory instead of providing onsite support). I wasn't comfortable working with a bad-RAID computer, but there was no other way to get the diagnostics, so I continued copying files to a USB (instead of firewire) drive and running tests. Several more problems showed up with Premiere Pro, with the Matrox card, and with Windows Media Player. Also, the RAID failure message came up sometimes when I booted and sometimes not. Like so many of the other problems on this system, this failure was intermittent.
Intermittent multivendor problems are a nightmare to diagnose, fix, and then retest. The testing problem is that if you partially fix an intermittent problem, it often doesn't go away, it just happens less often. So we could send this computer back to Alienware, they could "fix" it in good faith, do some basic diagnostics, and ship back a machine that still fails in the same ways, just less often.
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