I had an interesting day troubleshooting hard disk issues. The first problem was in a machine that hosts a bunch of my virtual machines I use for testing scenarios for work. It was running slower and slower as the last few days went by and boot times had doubled from the normal time frame on the physical box so I started troubleshooting. In the end, it ended up being that the onboard RAID controller was flaking out but not throwing any errors, at least nothing the OS was displaying. As soon as I disabled it the machine sped right back up. I plugged the disks into an extra IDE card I had in the sort drawer (actually saved one!) and the drives work fine though the data is gone. Not to worry there though. I ordered a new RAID controller from newegg which should be in here in a few days.
The next problem occurred this evening when another machine blew out a 160GB disk. I noticed it because the machine started hanging up and all attempts to access the drive hung the app attempting to do the access. Tried a reboot and the machine won’t even boot into Windows Server 2003 if the disk is plugged into the controller even though it isn’t the boot disk. Windows starts loading up and I see the fun Windows Server 2003 screen and it just hangs there forever. I was like WTF! So I look at the date on it… June 23,2003… Guess how many year warranty it has???? Yes, three years. How fun. Western Digital got their money out of that one, I am only out of warranty by like 18 or so days. I ordered a new drive, 320GB, that should also be here in a few days.
 joe
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I hope that this wasn’t SuperFastMofo that had a bad RAID controller. I’ve been waiting to hear about how she has faired so far.
Nope, this wasn’t SuperFastMofo, it was two of my other machines both of which are up and running great now again. Actually SFM has been doing relatively well. Very quick machine. My issues with it are as follows:
1. When running as SFMXP64 I started experiencing quite a bit of driver instability for my video card. Also many applications that I use on all of my machines that normally add items to the right click context didn’t for some reason. I expect it has to do with the various registry and file redirections that occur on x64 XP. These items were intensely annoying and since I actually use my PC to do work I can’t be trying to troubleshoot silly things like that on it so I backed down to SFMXP32.
2. It seems that Virtual Server 2005 R2 doesn’t like you running the virtuals on the same machine that you are TSing to the virtuals from. I have had a tremendous amount of issue with the network stack getting screwed up and going extremely slow when I do that so I moved the virtuals to another machine and everything runs great and if the virtuals I spin up on SFMXP32 I access with TS from OTHER machines it works great. Very odd. I will be loading up VMWARE Server shortly to see if I have the same issues. I don’t expect I will because I did that before with VMWARE Server and it worked great. Plus VMWARE server will let me run x64 guests which is going to be required for Exchange 12 and Virtual Server doesn’t support that.
Just out of curiosity, did you put a second NIC in the machine? My train of thought is you keep one NIC for the physical machine and you dedicate the second one to the VMs. I’ve done this with sucess in the past, and it makes it easier to manage network traffic.
You can check out http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2004/11/12/256294.aspx for something along the same idea for Virtual PC.
Matt: Good idea, I didn’t even think about it… I will have to try that out.