Post-Christmas hardware failure

[ewx]

I’ve not been having much luck with my Mac.

Firstly one of its hard disks has apparently failed; reading the contents of some file on its Windows partition reliably panics the kernel. (Granted it’s possible that this is just filesystem corruption toxic to Apple’s NTFS implementation; I’ll explore that on some system with better diagnostics than a hard crash at some point.)

I have backups and so have not lost anything but it remains a practical nuisance as it stops me playing Starcraft (which at 12 years since release is surely the game that’s held my interest for longest, bar none). I’ve been casting around for alternatives: my Windows 7 netbook (runs it but the colors are wrong; I think some other process is muscling in on the color palette), WINE (runs it but a little too slowly to be usable; reading around suggests that there’s an extra display copy going on over what there ought to be), the OS X version (the installer won’t recognize my CDs; I’ve no idea why and nor has the web).

Ultimately I expect to get things up and running on a replacement disk, but not one from Hitachi; this must be the third or fourth Deskstar I’ve had fail (and if you’re wondering why I continued to buy them with that level of bad experience, well, so am I).

Secondly one of its DIMMs has failed, reducing the available memory from 6GB to 2GB (it had 4x512MB plus 2x2GB, but the components must be paired). Conveniently the RAM riser boards have failure LEDs indicating which DIMM is broken. The components have a lifetime warranty, but it’s still annoying.

To answer the obvious question, yes I have checked that the disk is still broken in the absence of the bad RAM (which in any case the OS refused to use or even recognize that the slots had anything in them).

Comments

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I’ve not identified the failing file yet. Next step is to plug it into Linux and Windows systems in the hope of better diagnostics and (if it’s the FS not the disk) native repair tools. I have just acquired a USB SATA dock, so this should be a bit more convenient than it would have been 24 hours ago.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Linux can read every byte on the disk without any trouble, which suggests corrupt NTFS data structures somewhere... So I half-apologize to Hitachi; only half because given my experience, the assumption the disk had failed was a reasonable one to make l-)

[mjg59.livejournal.com]

http://forums.battle.net/thread.html?topicId=23214533181 is (unsurprisingly) full of a pile of misery and conflicting information, but the summary is that there's a set of registry keys in Windows 7 to turn on various DirectX compatibility fallbacks, that there's an existing entry for one version of Starcraft, and that if you add another entry for the version you're running then everything works fine.

(This is, of course, ridiculous)

[fanf]

I believe my office mate aia21@cam may have had a hand in the mac OS ntfs driver...