WHS hard disk drive fails

I've got a Windows Home Server Version 1 that is based on a DELL PowerEdge SC430 hardware. It has the original 160Gb system disc, a 250Gb data drive and a 500Gb data expansion drive. The latter 500Gb Samsung drive has been 'lost' by the WHS storage manager. I've got replicated, Shared data folders which appear to be alright but the Backup database is not available or repairable. The 500Gb disk is discoverable and the SMART data indicates it is OK.

I have a spare, new 1Tb Samsung drive I could add. I'm not too bothered about losing the backups as all the client PCs are OK and I can re-backup when the server is fixed.

The problem is fixed! I added the 1Tb drive to the data pool and then used the 'Remove' disk option from the Data storage menu to remove all traces of the faulty 500Gb drive. As I expected, all my backups had disappeared but I was able to recreate them from the clients.

I tested the faulty 500Gb which just threw up continous bad blocks so it is being RMAed back to Samsung. Server running smoothly again.

Three cores become four

I managed to unlock the fourth core of my AMD Athlon II X3 445 and still overclock it to 3.42GHz. It is now reported as an AMD Phenom II X4 B45 processor but without the 6Mb of L3 cache.

This makes it an even better processor as it easily breaks the 10,000 PCmark05 barrier and it appears to be even more responsive. Not bad for just £57! I did add an Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro v2 cooling fan and a pair of Corsair 2Gb DDR3 1333MHz memory modules. It is still worth it.

AVG Free Fails with Office 2010 Starter

I've stopped installing AVG Free 2011 with new DELL PCs that come with Microsoft's Office 2010 Starter Edition. This is because AVG gives a false positive on OFFSPON.EXE in the Q: drive which is generated by Microsoft Office 2010 SE. It then puts it in the virus vault which causes Word and Excel to stop working.

A work around is to exclude the Q: drive from the AVG scanning and ID processing but even this is fraught is errors and inconistences. It gives and 'Acccess is denied' message when you select the Q: drive even though it obviously is accessing it and it still does add the drive to the excluded paths anyway. Go figure!

Until they get this fixed and it has been a couple of months already, I will continue to load Microsoft's Security Essentials. Thereby cutting off AVG from any potential revenue from those people who are happy to upgrade to their Internet Security version.