Computer Voodoo? 686
jbeaupre asks: "A corollary to 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic' is that sometimes users have to resort to what I call 'computer voodoo.' You don't know why it works, you barely care how it works, but you find yourself doing the strangest things because it just seems to work. I'm talking about things like: smacking a PC every 5 seconds for an hour to keep it from stalling on a hard drive reformat (with nary a problem after the reformat); or figuring out the only way to get a PC partially fried by lightning to recognize an ethernet card, after booting into Windows, is to start the computer by yanking the card out and shoving it back in (thereby starting the boot processes). What wacky stuff have you done that makes no obvious sense, but just works?"
Not sure how it works... (Score:5, Interesting)
hard drive (Score:5, Interesting)
Hard Drive Massage (Score:5, Interesting)
In my repair monkey days, my shop used to handle data recovery jobs of all kinds. The problems ranged from minor filesystem corruption or unbootable drives to physical damage - heads, and even a bullet through a hard drive (No, I wasn't able to get anything off that one).
We had a variety of methods for dealing with the physically damaged drives that had suffered a head crash, but my boss had a technique he called the 'massage'. A clicking or noisy drive would be rotated around its various axes until the BIOS would recognize it on boot. Sometimes the clicking would stop and he would sit there holding the drive in that position or prop it up to keep it there.
Another method we used was to freeze the drives for a period of 15 minutes to 6 or 8 hours. Sometimes this allowed enough contraction to let the tracks line up again, and we'd get as much data as we could with the drive cold. Once, we even froze a drive between two ziploc bags of water with IDE and power cables hanging out the edge to keep the drive colder longer. It worked!
-- Shade
7-second rule (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:hit the monitor (Score:1, Interesting)
TV Card (Score:3, Interesting)
Wireless (Score:5, Interesting)
However, after I installed the card, Windows 2000 would crash with the following BSOD:
Annoying as heck-- somewhat expected from a cheap network card.
So one day I was wat home downloading Fedora with bittorrent--- my DSL connection was maxxed out. There was too much interference on the line, so I hit the little 'channel' button to switch to a different channel.
As soon as I hit the button on the phone -- *boom*, the computer threw up the Blue Screen of Death. ANd sure enough, I reboot, hit the button on the phone-- and *boom* -- Computer crashes again.
I have since replaced all of the D-Link cards with cards from other manufacturers.
Funky Hardware Stories (Score:4, Interesting)
I used to have an old pentium (133 I think) that ran well, except that the CD drive would only actually recognize a disk if you tilted the computer at about a 20 to 30 degree angle when the disk was inserted. I never did figure out why this fixed it, luckily I didn't need to use the cd drive very often.
I also used to have a cable modem that would drop the connection if you so much as blew on the power cord. I always just figgured that was just some flaky hardware, and eventually got the cable company to replace it. Another really aggrevating hardware problem that I never figgured out was an old Sony DVD drive that I had. When you opened the tray, it would about 1 to 2 seconds later automatically close the tray, but when you opened it again it would stay open for about 10 seconds, just long enough to remove or insert a disk.
I think everyone runs into a situation where there is some voodoo involved in solving a problem, it becomes problematic when people stop carying about having any answers, and just care about getting something working.
Re:Current computer (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Walk into the room (Score:5, Interesting)
I've seen other situations like this. Many times, it's because the user is doing something they know is stupid/they shouldn't be doing, and with a techie looking over their shoulder they don't do it.
Re:Current computer (Score:2, Interesting)
Once you've turned the monitor on once, its fine. You can then disconnect it, carry it to the other side of the room, unplug it, whatever.
It sounds crazy (and my CS degree tells me it must be something else) but the mere act of turning on the monitor seems to cure it.
More Magic? (Score:5, Interesting)
Got to love old school hacking
Always remember... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:7-second rule (Score:3, Interesting)
Or maybe just voodoo...
Smacking the monitor (Score:1, Interesting)
I had a motherboard... (Score:3, Interesting)
That wouldn't boot up unless freon spray was applied to the area just under the processor. (Okay, it wasn't real freon, but the CFC-free stuff...)
It seems that it had a few "cold soldered" joints on an IC or two, and freezing it brought them back into contact with each other.
Re:For most problems... (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, as far as real Computer/Equipment Voodoo is concerned, there is always the Heisenbug [wikipedia.org]. Just had a mechanical version of this today, the Bayer tech has spent 3 days on a machine to isolate a pump problem. To see the pumps, you have to open a panel either on the side or the front of the instrument. The past 2 days, he was working on it through the front, and the problem didn't occur. Today, after being called back because it happened again, he opened the side panel to watch it, and accidentally bumped the front panel while he was looking at it. As soon as the front panel closed, the problem occurred. It turns out that a zip-tie that holds some tubing from the pumps together was caught on the front panel, and when the panel door closed, it pulled on the zip-tie, which pulled on and pinched the tubing, causing a pressure sensor to throw a fault.
"You are a pirate!" - Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:For most problems... (Score:2, Interesting)
Not exactly on topic but close (Score:3, Interesting)
As for being on topic...I can guarantee that shit will break everytime I try to take a long weekend or vaction. The corollary is that everytime I'm on site for a "just in case", I end up not being needed.
Dr Who (Tom Baker) was here first (Score:3, Interesting)
He stumbled across an old spacecraft on a very distant planet. As he sat down at the control console he remarked, "this looks like Earth technology". As he began to power it up it slowly came to life then started to fade back out. He kicked the bottom of the console and the rocket resumed slowly coming back to life. The Doctor remarked "Definitely Earth technology".
I just LOVE the implication that this sort of "kick it to keep it working" is a characteristic aspect of our technology that (in the world of this SF TV show at least) sets us apart from other species.
Re:Walk into the room (Score:3, Interesting)
As it is now, my fiance (I know- invoking mythical creatures on
I guess my best bet is to convert the family's PC's to all Linux. Right now all three user PC's are WinXP SP2, with a fourth (Cent OS) as server. My "possesed biatch" is a tri-boot PC (Win98se for older games that won't run in XP, Win XpSP2, and Fedora Core 5- which is used 65-75% of the time).
I will get it straightened out when I can afford to take the network and all 4 PC's with me to Japan and have a Shinto preist perform an exorcism on the equipment. Don't know what else to do at this stage, but at least most of the problems are entertaining (but a hassle) instead of debilitating. LOL!... as a side note- I used to work with a guy who no matter what disaster would happen, he would just laugh. It would really bug me until I finally asked him why he could laugh at 4-6 hours "wasted" work- his reply: "well, I can either laugh about it, or cry about it, and laughing feels better and keeps me in a better frame of mind to deal with the problem, so I laugh about it when I can."
Good advice, tho' not easy sometimes. (this was when working in a heavy truck garage just out of the Army, thus the 4-6 hr.'s wasted work above- some jobs can get you in MUCH deeper than half or 2/3 a shift!!!)
Performa 5200 and the mouse vs. network ritual. (Score:5, Interesting)
Read that second link for all the gory details of why the follow scenario works, and you'll shudder.
I used to note in college that when doing particularly fast FTP transfers that saturated by 10-Base-T card that the machine would often lock up within a minute of starting the transfer. For months, I fiddled around and noticed that if I was actively working that this didn't happen. Eventually, I found the article I mentioned and realized that if I kept moving the mouse constantly, the machine wouldn't get in whatever weird state locked up the machine and I could finish my transfers. That's right -- to run FTP (or any other sustained, saturated transfer), I had to sit there moving the mouse in circles through the entire transfer.
Essentially, the "Left 32" bus described in the article was shared by the 16-bit Apple Desktop Bus (for mouse and keyboard) and the 16-bit networking card (as well as audio and the 8-bit SCSI controller). So long as I kept interrupting the bus with input from ADB, the networking card was unable to flood the controller that had to make sense of all the different bit-widths and clock speeds between the various busses hanging off of it, and the machine wouldn't lock up.
Now how's that for some serious computer voodoo?
Re:hitting it (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:My analysis? (Score:3, Interesting)
Long story short... there is one screw in the motherboard that if I tighten it down... the motherboard doesn't work. You can't believe how long it took to find one screw in a sea of possible errors.
Also, I used to have to put my PS1 up on frozen peas for it to work. It didn't like other frozen vegetables, just peas.
Re:My analysis? (Score:5, Interesting)
Hah. I had something close to that one. A friend's Windows XP Home system. Boot it up, runs fine for about 30 seconds, then locks up hard. Reboot it, works fine for as long as you like. Next time you boot it up, locks up after about 30 seconds. Reboot, works fine. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I booted it up off a Knoppix disc and ran a bunch of hardware tests -- nothing. And no problems with locking up either.
Back to Windows -- same thing.
I eventually realized the pattern: after a clean Windows shutdown, it would lock up 30 seconds after the next boot. After a dirty shutdown (e.g. power cycle or reset button), it would boot up fine. Obviously the Windows shutdown was leaving something in a funky state for next time. Beats me what.
I told my friend she had the choice of doing a re-install and keeping fingers crossed, or always shutting it down with the power switch, or moving to Linux. I don't recall what she did beyond passing the box on to her kids because she'd already got a new one for herself.
Re:Walk into the room (Score:3, Interesting)
Long story short: we spend all night troubleshooting the PC and even rebooting back in to Windows to verify that the card itself is still working there. The card was working perfectly in Windows and it had worked perfectly under the SuSE distro that was overwritten when I installed Mandrake. After working on it for a while we decide to call it a night, and I turn the machine off and he goes home. About 5 minutes after he's gone, I decide to boot the computer again. Lo and behold! Sound works! I call him this and tell him this. He comes over again the next day, and of course the sound card won't work when I try to show it to him.
I don't know if we ever figured out what was wrong. I think Tim and I just decided that he must have had some kind of unusual biorhythm or something.
Re:Dowsing for bad RAM chips. (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, the short answer is, because that was Apple's official service procedure.
The binary search method is theoretically the fastest way to identify the bad chip. This is a basic comp sci search algorithm, if I remember the it right, with 24 chips, you can identify the bad chip in 4 swaps. Replacing chips one at a time is, on average, the worst way to find one bad chip. Of course you could get lucky and it was the first chip you replace, row 1 socket 1. How often is that ever going to happen?
Also consider that the RAM diagnostic program could run for hours to run before a chip faulted, so swapping chips was not always the most time-consuming part of the test procedure. I sometimes used to speed up the process by gently heating up the motherboard with a hair dryer, on the theory that intermittent chips were more prone to failure when they were hot, but this was not usually effective.
Also consider how expensive RAM chips were back around 1980. We were NOT going to just replace every chip until we got the bad one, we only replaced known bad chips, if we pulled out chips, once they were ruled out as not the cause of the problem, they went back into the customer's machine. Otherwise we would have ended up with drawers full of suspect chips, and customers would have had to pay for every single chip we replaced. Labor was much cheaper than parts, back in those days.
Now I'll tell you what REALLY hurt.. when I had to service a machine that had TWO bad chips.. but fortunately, that rarely happened. They almost always went bad one at a time.
Speaking of hard drives (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, I used to have three or four MFM hard drives in various states of disrepair. (I think they were 40 *meg* hard drives, but I only had a controller to control up to 20 meg, to give an idea how old this hardware was.) One by one they died, until finally only one was left. When it gave up the ghost, it would spin up, then immediately spin back down. I dug into it and found some connections I could short across while it was spinning up and then break the connection, and it would keep running. I was too poor to want to go spend $1 on a pushbutton, so I just had two wires hanging out of the front of the computer that I held together while booting the PC. I ran it that way for over a year...
A non-computer story, but more interesting one, is of an old Ford Escort I used to have. The starter went out on it, and, again, I was poor, so I dug into it. I finally figured out that the relay was kicking out too far and shorting out against the housing, so I duct taped a kitchen sponge to the inside of the relay housing and put it back together. I never had a problem with the starter again for the 2 years I had the car.
That same car later had the fuel pump go out. When it went out, I asked my stepdad if I should check to make sure the pump was out instead of a wiring or power problem, and he said nah, it's the pump. So I bought a replacement - it didn't help. So, I hunted around under the hood until I found some leads that were hot when the key was on, but not when it was off, and I used ties to secure an extension cord from the leads to the fuel pump. The car ran fine.
That was in the summer. When winter came along, one day I needed to defrost the front window as I was driving down the road. I flipped the vent from dash to defrost, and the engine stopped running. (I was doing 50 mph down the road at the time.) I flipped it back to vent, and the engine started right back up again.
Somehow I had found a wire that only gave power when the vent was not on defrost. I never fixed it, just kept the inside warm enough that it didn't frost over.
Now I'm a software developer and not poor. I virtually never fix (or jerry rig) anything myself, other than software and the occasional computer hardware issue.
Re:IDE drive order (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Current computer (Score:2, Interesting)
When you reboot, the platers are already spinning, so the HD is ready when the BIOS looks for it.
Re:More Magic? (Score:2, Interesting)
Reminds me of an old 486 I ran into in Highschool back in the days of the old AT hard wired power switches. The damn thing would turn on or off like one of those touch lamps whenever someone touced (and grounded, I assume) the case.
But the freakiest thing was the little 13 inch TV my parents owned that would turn itself off, and would then turn on again if, and not until, I yelled at it.
Hard drive on Ice (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:hard drive (Score:3, Interesting)
Percussive Maintenance (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Performa 5200 and the mouse vs. network ritual. (Score:3, Interesting)
I also remember my old Tandy COCO Days with my external 300 Baud modem... I could dial into Delphi but I couldn't start pressing keys or the Term Program I wrote would freeze. So I had to wait till connection was established and got to know the tones pretty good even up to my 2400 baud modem I last had on it... To this day, When I listen to fax machines, I picture the handshake protocol while it is happening, and I HATE the fax machines that mute the tones! (I will even go up to the copier/fax unit at work and use the send immidiately, dial offhook mode so that I KNOW that it was sent and not have to bother checking for the little xfr report later...
Of course this reference brings back another trick of mine. When I worked as a lab op in college, I worked the opening and closing shifts often. (beer right after, and passout in the lab overnight to open it up in the AM. Not always, but NOT kidding either.
Re:"You are a pirate!" - Microsoft (Score:3, Interesting)
A few years ago, my pc started randomly turning itself off while I was using it.
During the course of swapping parts in an out of the motherboard and trying to boot the computer to see if a specific component was causing the problem (it was the power-supply, duh!), Windows eventually got to a place where it needed to be reactivated.
The network card didn't function anymore because its driver had been uninstalled (???) during the tests.
I didn't feel like spending any time on the phone over it. I felt it was bad enough to have a hardware failure, but even WORSE to have the operating system prolong the crisis for no other reason than it not trusting me.
So I downloaded and burned a Knoppix bootable CD with a different machine and booted my computer with that.
I used Knoppix like that for about a month while evaluating Linux distros.
When I had decided which Linux distribution I was going to go with (Gentoo), I used Knoppix to backup the data from my computer's hard disk over the LAN to a second machine and then using the installation handbook, I partitioned and formatted the drives, downloaded and installed the base system and have never looked back since.
Super NoFriendo (Score:4, Interesting)
Finally it stopped working alltogether, but addicted to one of the games, I set to taking it apart and finding the problem. While it was apart, I found that if I held the game cartridge in with a certain amount of pressure it would work, but too much pressure or none at all and it would not operate at all.
Searching throughout the house for an appropriate weight, I ended up finding a 3 quarters empty bottle of Amaretto in the parental unit's liquor cabinet that worked perfectly. I spent the last semester of my senior year with a bottle of alcohol staring at me that I could never drink - for if I did my game console would die on me. It didn't last once summer started, though
Re:Current computer (Score:4, Interesting)
When they were on the third or fourth server, they realized the servers weren't booting up when they put them back in the rack. So they brought them back to the desk, booted them up and they worked fine. They'd put them back in the rack and nothing.
It took a couple of hours to figure out what the problem was. Somehow he'd managed to compile the kernel in a way that it wouldn't finish booting, if no keyboard was hooked up. He had no way to recompile the kernel there at the data center. He lives in Birmingham and the data center is in Atlanta, so going home to his own computer wasn't an option.
So he ended up buying a few dozen $5 keyboards at some computer shop and just laying them on top of the servers when they put them back in their racks. Worked like a charm.
Re:I've got the touch (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, that happened. I also had the strangest, most bizzarre HARDWARE glitch with my MONITOR -- it was almost as if I had an LCD with dead pixels.. but I've a CRT. And they were about 1x1mm blocks all set together in neat tetris-esque patterns. Lasted about a week.
I blamed Mexico -- that's where it was made. The poor spirit of some mexican child who died making it, I think.
Commodore copy protection madness (Score:3, Interesting)
As everyone knows, Commodore VIC-1541 Toaster is a very, very odd thing.
I once got a C64 game collection. The store was half across the country. Got home. Tried playing the games. A few didn't work. We mailed the games back to the store for replacement.
The games came back with a note "If the games do not work, turn the floppy drive to its side." With a helpful diagram.
Flipped the drive to its side, tried running the game, and wham - time to enjoy some games.
I later ran into some games that had such a weird copy protection that, in turn, didn't work while the drive was on its side...
Now, honest truth to tell, I've looked at modern attempts at DRM/copy protections with rather bleary eyes, but I think Starforce and the Sony XCP rootkits seem to have finally beaten this stuff - time to get worried about nasty copy protection schemes again...
Good old Windows NT 4.0 and HAL voodoo (Score:3, Interesting)
After a bit of digging I was finally able to determine that IRQ 9 was indeed being shared by more than just the tuner card and the video card; my ZIP Zoom card was also using IRQ 9.
For those who don't know what a Zip Zoom card was, it was a stripped down SCSI controller mainly used for external Zip SCSI drives.
After a few months of being unable to use both my Zip drive and tuner card at the same time, I grew weary of plugging/unplugging the cards based on when I wanted to use them and finally decided to do something about it.
The first step I took was to take a second look at the offending IRQ and changing it. The Zip zoom controller had a few jumpers you enabling you to change the port and IRQ. Finding out that the offending IRQ was 9 I thought it was a simple task at moving the IRQ jumper and therefore assigning a different IRQ.
I still get the same error. Move the jumper to its original position, same error. This is when things start to get weird. I keep moving the jumper between positions and NT still keeps saying it's using IRQ9. I boot into Linux and shuffle the jumpers back and forth and amazingly Linux says the IRQ for the card changes.
I then take a closer look at the card and its documentation and notice that the only IRQs the card supports are IRQ 5 and 7 (and NT reports it as having IRQ 9); I still remember the "hmm... this is odd" feeling I got when I found that out.
Long story short, it turns out that NT's HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) decided that my Zip Zoom card belonged best at IRQ 9 and assigned IRQ9 to it accordingly. I was then able to change the IRQ for the zip zoom card so that it used the a different IRQ than IRQ9; thus enabling my to finally use my Zip drive at the same time as my TV Tuner card.
This is what I call voodoo.