Date: Mon, 09 Jul 2001 13:30:51 +1200 From: Craig Harding <crh@outpost.co.nz> To: chat@freebsd.org Subject: MS has quality programmers and OS design? Stop smoking crack! Message-ID: <3B49094B.C8506331@outpost.co.nz>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
I've been having numerous problems over the last 2 days getting a new 20GB IDE drive (Quantum, 7200RPM) working in an older (Win98, P2 233) machine here. It's our video edit machine that I needed desperately to do work on, so I didn't want to noodle endlessly replacing motherboards and other components unnecessarily. The existing system drive died Fri night/Sat morning, I was able to get the replacement drive on Saturday. If you're familiar with Win9x, you'll be aware that Windows likes to reboot after almost every configuration change / package installation. Which I'm doing a lot of, installing all the special drivers and applications on this new drive. But about half the time it'd do a proper Windows shutdown & restart only to do a scandisk on boot, indicating the disk wasn't been left clean prior to reboot. About a quarter of the time it'd report a corrupt registry and all the system config changes I'd made in the last hour (eg turning off the f***ing active desktop BS) would be lost. I got annoyed, and suspicious. It looked like some kind of problem with write caching, as if the disk contents weren't being updated properly prior to the reboot. I wondered if there was a problem with the drive, I checked motherboard compatibility issues, I installed updates and patches, all to no avail. I searched the MS knowledge base and found zip. Time passed. My frustration levels (with a deadline ticking away for a video rough edit to be completed) increased. And then I chanced upon the Win98 critical updates (yes, I know I should have looked there earlier). And I found this: http://www.microsoft.com/windows98/downloads/contents/WUCritical/q273017/Default.asp Here is an excerpt: > Windows IDE Hard Drive Cache Package > > The Windows IDE Hard Drive Cache Package provides a workaround to > a recently identified issue with computers that have the combination > of Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) hard disk drives with large > caches and newer/faster processors. Computers with this combination > may risk losing data if the hard disk shuts down before it can > preserve the data in its cache. The update references the following KB article, which I didn't find while searching (using such <sarcasm> esoteric </sarcasm> search terms as "write cache"). http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q273/0/17.asp So I found a solution. But check out Microsoft's detailed explanation of the problem: > Older processors typically execute the shutdown code slowly enough > that the hard disk's cache flushed the written data to the physical > media before the machine lost power. As processors have increased > in speed, the shutdown time has decreased to the point that data > may still be in the hardware cache when a computer is turned off, > and that data may be lost. In other words, Windows doesn't actually do anything to ensure that a HD write cache is written to disk before restarting, it just hopes that the shutdown procedure is slow enough (and the cache small enough) that the drive will have time to flush its cache before Windows pulls the plug. And you'll really like this bit: > This is not a problem that is specific to Windows, or any given > operating system, for that matter. Nor is it specific to any one > brand of processor or hardware -- it is an industry-wide issue > that affects a variety of vendors Not to mention their solution: > This update introduces a slight delay in the shutdown process. > The delay of two seconds allows the hard drive's onboard cache > to write any data to the hard drive. Gee, so they wait 2 seconds, and then reboot. That's clever. "sync sync sync" anyone? Is FreeBSD's IDE driver a little more intelligent? -- C. -- Craig Harding crh@outpost.co.nz ICQ# 26701833 Outpost Digital Media Ltd http://www.outpost.co.nz To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?3B49094B.C8506331>