My GDC SA2100 Won't boot

[Paul Gabriel]

Not unless you specify it. That's a series1 Barco, so you may need the adapter frame with it so it plugs into that projector. GDC can tell you the exact part numbers and what is actually necessary. Also ask if they are still doing the server trade ins.

Mark

Thank you, Will do that.

[Stephan Shelley]

Something else to consider before jumping to a new server is if your interface board will accept a TLS connection. If it is a security anti tamper one should be fine if not the new server might not connect. Same is true if you upgraded to DCI compliant software on the old server.

[Leo Enticknap]

There is an LED gone out on the dashboard of my 2019 Civic Touring Sport. I can't figure out how to get at it to replace it; I called the Honda Dealer Service Center and the tech there is suggesting that I get a new CIvic instead. Thing is, I can't afford a new Honda at the moment. And they can actually make such a suggestion with a straight face.

Sorry to drag this slightly OT, but didn't it come with a standard 36k mile or three-year warranty? My 2018 HR-V did, and I was told by the dealer that this was the standard for all new Hondas (this of course segued into a sales pitch for an extended warranty). Unless you've done over 36k miles in around a year, I'd have thought that this would be a warranty repair.

[Marcel Birgelen]

The error being displayed is not necessarily an unrecoverable error and can likely be fixed by running a manual "fsck" on the affected drive. Try to get somebody with some basic Linux knowledge over the floor and do the following:

Try to boot the machine using a Linux recovery medium via USB and try to run an "fsck" on the affected partition from there. Try to correct any errors that are found. If there are no hard errors, chances are that the machine will do a proper boot on the next boot cycle afterwards.

If you succeed into fixing the machine this way, please make sure to upgrade to any recent software release.

[Paul Gabriel]

The error being displayed is not necessarily an unrecoverable error and can likely be fixed by running a manual "fsck" on the affected drive. Try to get somebody with some basic Linux knowledge over the floor and do the following:

Try to boot the machine using a Linux recovery medium via USB and try to run an "fsck" on the affected partition from there. Try to correct any errors that are found. If there are no hard errors, chances are that the machine will do a proper boot on the next boot cycle afterwards.

If you succeed into fixing the machine this way, please make sure to upgrade to any recent software release.

Thank you, Marcel.
there's a pin for advance options, I don't know what that pin is. when i try to pull up a command line it doesn't come up plus there's a BIOS pin that i do not know and GDC completely ignored me on the pin stuff.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Well, yes. GDC isn't known to provide those passwords to end-users unfortunately.

But, usually, you can get the machine to boot from media like USB sticks or bootable DVDs.

[Paul Gabriel]

Well, yes. GDC isn't known to provide those passwords to end-users unfortunately.

But, usually, you can get the machine to boot from media like USB sticks or bootable DVDs.

Alright, let me try that, will update you.

[Bruce Cloutier]

Do any of you know about SpinRite by GRC? I have it on a MSDOS bootable USB stick. It can non-destructively scan drives and sometimes repair issues like this. I have had success with it. I am not normally one to endorse things but this one has been around and was developed by another one of us old-timers. www.grc.com It takes hours to run depending on disk size and all of that.

They recommend running it periodically as PM.

[Paul Gabriel]

Do any of you know about SpinRite by GRC? I have it on a MSDOS bootable USB stick. It can non-destructively scan drives and sometimes repair issues like this. I have had success with it. I am not normally one to endorse things but this one has been around and was developed by another one of us old-timers. www.grc.com It takes hours to run depending on disk size and all of that.

They recommend running it periodically as PM.

how do i use this software to remedy the situation?

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

The error being displayed is not necessarily an unrecoverable error and can likely be fixed by running a manual "fsck" on the affected drive.

Marcel,

GDC does an fsck every six boot ups automatically.

[Bruce Cloutier]

how do i use this software to remedy the situation?

It simply scans and refreshes the sectors on the drives at a very low level with a lot of retries and other tricks to achieve a successful recovery. So if your machine does not boot because of that disk problem, the problem can sometimes be rectified by this. A lot of people have found this to be a life saver. It has saved me a couple of times.

An fsck doesn't scan nearly at the level of this SpinRite. Such disk scans generally recover lost file blocks from incomplete writes that occur when software crashes or machines lose power. Like chkdsk. This SpinRite analyzes the disk sectors non-destructively on a bit by bit basis right on the media.

If you can boot from a USB, you can boot up and let SpinRite run. It won't install anything or otherwise alter your machine other than to analyse and hopefully correct your disk problem. After it runs maybe your server will boot.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Do any of you know about SpinRite by GRC? I have it on a MSDOS bootable USB stick. It can non-destructively scan drives and sometimes repair issues like this. I have had success with it. I am not normally one to endorse things but this one has been around and was developed by another one of us old-timers. www.grc.com It takes hours to run depending on disk size and all of that.

They recommend running it periodically as PM.

I don't know this particular product, but in this particular case you'd need a Linux recovery CD, you really need a recovery utility that can recover your EXT3 or EXT4 partition, like a recent "fsck".

I haven't tested this particular one, but http://www.system-rescue-cd.org/ offers such a rescue CD. I usually simply use a Debian Live CD, which is also an option. But really, you should get somebody on the floor that knows a thing or two about Linux, as he/she needs to locate the correct partition for you. Partition names can vary between Kernel releases.

Usually, if Grub isn't locked, you can boot with "init=/bin/bash" and get a shell at bootup, even if you don't have the "root" password.

GDC does an fsck every six boot ups automatically.

Yes, but you can start fsck in different modes, the mode it start up in at boot will not correct any major errors. In order to do this, you need to run FSCK manually with the right parameters. Usually, if you start it from the command-line as root, it will assume "repair privileges". So, if you do "fsck <partition>" it will usually try stuff like orphaned inodes, invalid superblocks, etc. It will ask you to confirm any repairs by hitting "y <enter>", but you can also override this with the "-y" option at the command line, which means: yes to everything.

I do not recomend doing this on machines that are still under support. Get GDC on the line for this and do what they tell you to do, but in this case, it seems to be a last-ditch effort on an out-of-service piece of hardware. Also, like I mentioned earlier: Get someone over there who is a proficient Linux admin, otherwise, chances of screwing things more than they are right now are pretty realistic.

Still, as long as you don't encounter hard read/write errors, it's usually something that can be resolved in software only.

[Bruce Cloutier]

So SpinRite doesn't care or even know what the disk is used for or what is on it. It works at such a low level. The theory as I understand it is that the magnetic media wears with time and use. There are sectors on every drive that are written when first formatted and never again. Eventually there are read failures. The drives retry and error correct so you aren't even aware of impending read issues until the drive's system can't handle it and then it may be too late.

SpinRite goes through and rewrites each sector refreshing the magnetic strength. There is more than just the data that your computer cares about there. There are timing marks, error checking and error correction data. So running this refresh like once a year is a good thing.

But since it works at this low level, it keeps every bit exactly as is. If it has a read failure it will retry as much as it can to try to get a clean read. Even when that is barely possible I think it combines data from multiple reads trying to reconstruct the bit stream satisfying the error checks. I've not dug into enough to know exactly what games are going on there. But Steve Gibson who wrote this long ago and continues to maintain it knows his stuff. Steve has been doing the Security Now show on Twit (twit.tv) for like forever. He is also a PDP-8 fan and on the show you can see a couple of his PDP-8 replicas running in the background.

So this is a different level from file system checks and OS recovery. There is a lot of detail disclosed on the GRC site. It is a unique product.

For an industry like ours here that is so dependent on disk drives, this kind of PM is probably worthwhile.

You can stick the drive to be serviced into another computer. Since SpinRite doesn't boot the drive or really access the content through any OS, it works just fine. So I am not promoting this product for anyone and I'll leave it here. I was just wondering if any of you were aware of it. Even the JNIOR to the rest of the world is a really well kept secret. I guess you have to mention stuff once and a while. It's the word-of-mouth thing.

[Marco Giustini]

Can I say something slightly unhelpful and off topic: we (mankind) need to stop this silly behaviour. World resources are not unlimited. We cannot skip a machine that costed energy and pollution to manufacture because someone is intentionally refusing to provide the SUPER-EASY fix to "repair" it. This should be forbidden by law. Not to mention the money involved into this but that's a secondary subject.

[Leo Enticknap]

And at the risk of crossing the line into politics, I'd like to voice my complete agreement. Not only did the machine in question cost energy and pollution to manufacture, but, if the super easy repair were done, it would continue to do the job required of it, likely for many years into the future. I get really annoyed at technology manufacturers who put out slick Greta Thunberg-esque propaganda about how their products are green this and eco that, but then force the same products into artificial obsolescence, many years before it should become uneconomic to maintain them. The PC in my office at work is a Dell desktop tower manufactured in 2007. It was about to go in the skip/dumpster when I retrieved it from the condemned pile, replaced one bulging capacitor on the motherboard, a fan and the power supply unit, added an extra 4GB of DDR2 and a SSD, and installed Windows 10 on it. For all the things I do on it, it is fast enough, and completely reliable.

It made no economic sense to do this. I could have bought a refurbished PC on Amazon with a much faster processor and double the RAM for around half to two thirds of the cost of the parts, the W10 license and my time in rehabilitating that one, but I did it to make a point.

If everybody extended the life of their bogstandard Dell office PC to 20 years by doing what I did, Dell would lose a crap ton of money, which is why they, and other electronics manufacturers (both consumer and B2B), tilt the playing field to discourage us from doing that. But if business leaders and politicians want to be really serious about the Greta Thunberg schtick, they need to tilt that playing field back again such that we are encouraged to fix and maintain large pieces of capital equipment - PCs, cars, DCP servers, or whatever - such that they have much longer service lives.