What happened:
Windows stopped booting.
The Results:
The hard drive has been reformatted. Despite this, only one ISA card is
allowed in the computer. We lost the Modem, Network Card and the Video
Capture Card. We have purchased a new Modem. We cannot purchase any
more equipment or another computer at this time due to this computer
crash and a $1000 bill for Vehicle #1.
What this means for CASI Members:
This affects the following CASI services:
CASI Live Weather Station - CLOSED Indefinitely. Without a network
connection the CASI Live Weather Station cannot work as I am unable to
accept the CPU drain by the AccuWeather software and must be run on
another computer. The Weather Station is closed until further notice.
Automatic archiving of the data beyond the WX-200's limit of 24 hours is
also no longer possible. If someone writes a program to accept the
WX-200's data in Windows95 then we could think about resurrecting it.
CASILIST - This mailing list is once again OPEN but with few members.
We lost all members prior to several months ago. We will attempt to
manually re-add the new members in the upcoming weeks. We believe that
a recent version of the Member Database exists on backup somewhere. I
will forward the CASILIST messages that I have received from you during
the downtime as soon as possible.
CASI Web Site - The web site was not affected by this outage. However,
due to the rebuilding of the CASI computer system, I regret to say that
further development of the website planned for this storm season will be
delayed by several months. We lost many development tools which will
have to be reinstalled, as well as some development work. Also, no
further Video Storm Reports can be gathered because of the loss of the
video capture card.
This is a bit off-topic for the CASILIST but I think it may help other
Members (since none of us are reading this without a computer):
Lessons we have learned that may be helpful to other CASI Members who
own PC's:
#1: Take care of your computer. This crash was likely my fault for one
reason or another. The cause was corruption of the hard disk, due to
either a virus (an extremely rare occurance) or just lack of upkeep of
the PC. I had not been running anti-virus or disk utilities for a long
period of time and also let the hard drive become full several times and
occasionally had not shut down the computer in the proper fashion.
#2: Keep backups. I have been through 4 tape drives in the past several
years so I now consider them an unreliable and unacceptable form of
backup. The hardware fails frequently and the tapes frequently lose
data, especially compressed data. Do backup frequently and use a
non-volatile (non-magnetic such as CD-ROM) form of storage. I waited to
long to purchase a new backup system and as a result lost some data.
#3: Make sure the computer manufacturer you buy from has acceptable
technical support procedures. This means an unlimited 1-800 tech
support number. Fortunately Micron, the manufacturer of CASI's main
computer, does. I would not be typing this e-mail to you now if not for
their tech support. Their support ideas did not seem consistent and
they would not take responsibility for their computer's one-ISA card
limit that suddenly appeared. However the tech support was there, and
was free.
--
==============================================================
Jesse Ferrell - Meteorologist - j{at}weatherwatchers.org
Central Atlantic Storm Investigators - www.weatherwatchers.org
"A tornado? Why wasn't it dissipated by the weather
modification net?" --Jean-Luc Picard || ICQ No. 136862 ||