From Newsgroup: alt.comp.os.windows-11
On Thu, 12/4/2025 4:54 PM, MikeS wrote:
On 04/12/2025 15:39, jason_warren wrote:
I posted earlier about how the disk numbering changed:
disk zero became disk one and vice versa. I still don't
know how that happened, but after a month I think I'm back
from Computer Hell.
The Alienware R9 suddenly began to run very slowly. I ran
every diagnostic I could find - the built-in ones and
others. All passed, including the long versions that took
hours to complete.
I am diligent about backups and so I restored the SSD and
spinning SCSI drive, but that didn't solve the problem.
The machine still took half an hour just to boot, and I
could hear the SCSI disk rattling a lot throughout.
Today I did a "clean everything" fresh Win 11
installation. The install proceeded quickly (I'd tried
before and it was very slow). Forcing the Win installation
to use the SSD cut install time from more than an hour to
15 minutes.
By and by, Windows reported that there was a slew of
updates to apply, about 30. That's not surprising
considering how long it had been since the last update.
But what I noticed, and hadn't seen before, was the fact
that four of the updates were for the (Intel) SCSI
adapter! I've seen plenty of updates over the years, but
they've always been for drivers.
After the installation and required reboot, the machine
took off and is now running just as it always had.
There's more cleanup to do (and a fresh backup!). So, I'm
left wondering what happened.
I have an idea (please don't laugh). I've been a ham radio
amateur since the 60's. We are now experiencing solar
cycle 25 and it's been the strongest in years. Cycles are
on an ~11-year cycle. A strong CME (Coronal Mass Ejection)
floods nearby space (us!) with a LOT of energetic
particles that are known to be able to disrupt sensitive
circuitry, sometimes momentarily, other times actually
damaging the minute gates in today's super-dense chips.
Could the SCSI adapter have gotten dinged by a charged
particle?
No idea what went wrong but I am certain it was not because
your SCSI adapter was dinged by a charged particle. You just
installed Win 11 on an SSD so why would the SCSI adapter affect
its boot time with or without new drivers?
Disks receive analysis before they are mounted. Windows uses
automount in a sense. The reason Windows can CHKDSK so many
partitions sequentially at startup, is due to autochk.
(ControlSet001 here is likely to be CurrentControlSet)
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Session Manager
BootExecute REG_MULTI_SZ autocheck autochk *
You would need to find a log of SCSI sense codes, to get some
idea what the "complaint" was on this subsystem. On Windows,
SCSI CDB (control data block) are used for "foreign" devices,
and you would be surprised how many subsystems use that. SCSI is
the interface proxy for unknown device types, allowing hobbyists
to glue things to an OS.
The first outboard SATA controller, the SIL3112, it used
a two-deep driver stack, and one of the layers, its job was
to translate a SCSI CDB into something a SATA interface could use.
This means, one of those driver layers is pretty thin.
The "secret" to storage, is good quality logging.
Even a Linux boot takes three minutes, when it is
distracted by some secondary drive having a bad hair day.
The "sudo dmesg" on Ubuntu, shows you what is going on.
That's not a fancy logging system, but many people use that
in lieu of learning how the "latest hot thing" in logging works.
In the same way that nobody here really wants to use EventVwr
for anything that matters.
Paul
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