5th week of ITS internship 2/22/2010

Today was a busy day in the ITS department. We mainly worked on our Clonezilla project. We got our client PCs today, and our server. We spent most of the time setting them up and getting all the parts we needed to get all of them to work. The main problem was finding a DVI to VGA cord for one of the machines. We also labeled all of the to make sure someone wouldn't take them. Mike set us up with a cubicle so we would have a little space. After we finished that, Mike had us look at the machine we fixed a couple of weeks ago with the bad memory. It was having trouble getting the Active X directory. However we ran out of time to really dive into it and find what the problem was.

4th Week of ITS intership 2/15/2010

Today the campus was shut down due to snow; however I used the time to try and learn more about Clonezilla and are operating system we decided to put it on, Ubuntu.

3rd week of ITS internship 2/8/2010

Today we were installing Windows 7 on the computer we have for our projects that work. This took a fair amount of time, but when we were done we turned our attention to a School of Business computer that was brought in. It would not boot Windows; so Mike let us use this tool called Ultimate Boot CD I believe, and we used it to look for problems. Most of the tests it ran, like the hard drive or CPU test, it passed; however it kept hanging up on the Ram test, so we decided to pull one of the memory sticks, and sure enough the first one we pulled, it was able to boot Windows. We tried many different arrangements of the two memory sticks and slots they were in, but the first one we pulled never worked. We also noticed that the screen had a nice yellow tent to it, so we pulled the graphics card and just used the integrated graphics and sure enough the yellow tent was gone. We were able to get it to the password screen, which was much farther than we were able to begin with, but we were unable to test it any farther because we didn't have the password. It also didn't have a SATA cable to begin with so we had to use one we found.

2nd week of ITS internship 2/1/2010

Today we pulled all the known bad parts out of the computers and made a log of all the parts that were either missing or were bad. If we had them, we went ahead and wrote down the serial numbers of the parts. We did this because Tangent, the company that supplies the computers, will replace the bad parts free of charge, but if they are missing, the school will have to buy the new parts off of them. We sat the bad parts on top of the computer they came from so everybody could easily see where they went. I found it interesting that all of the drives that we had that were bad were the infamous Hitachi Deskstar. The Deskstar line, or Deathstar as was commonly called, was actually bought from IBM; however before Hitachi bought the lineup, it was considered one of the worst hard drive lineups of all time, this Wikipedia article, Deskstar failures, goes into more details about all the problems IBM and Hitachi had over them. Hitachi was supposed to have started making better drives, but it appears they were still having problems, at least when the hard drives we have were made. We also spent some time trying to reinstall windows to see if it was a bad install or a hard drive causing problems on one machine, after some time where the installer seemed frozen and would boot anymore, we decided to pull a known good hard drive from a machine and sure enough it worked fine.