02.08.2019

Ahhh, of course I should know that "An unspecified error occurred (696e647863686b2e 9cb)" actually means "hey, your USB disk is drawing too much power from the USB-port"!

Tags: Configuration Thoughts
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TL ; DR

  • Suspect your USB connections – allways!!
  • Expect to spend hours on the forums looking for symptoms, hints and stuff to try out!
  • DON’T EVER THINK about getting the Microsoft Surface Dock … piece of heavy junk!

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Disk operations onto the BitLocker-drive reports tons of errors1!

Isn’t it great when Windows (and most other software too Smile) gives you completely other symptoms to problems?

In my previous post I tried to get BitLocker to play nicely on my machine. Huge problems with drop-outs, perhaps not even the fault of BitLocker itself, but it turned out that I couldn’t even connect the disk anymore without Windows going completely haywire! Lot’s of messages in the event log like;

“Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort3, was issued”

"The IO operation at logical block address xxx was retried"

"A timeout (30000 millisec) was reached while waiting for a transaction response from the WSearch service"

Trying to salvage the drive – and as a result of reading loads of forum-posts on the net, I saw that I could try to use the old CHKDSK again. Run in as an Administrator with the parameters /F /R and /X (well, F should be automatically implied by R). The most important parameter is the X, which tells CHKDSK to unmount the drive for processing. The first run yesterday evening ran for a full 6-7 hours, and when I returned to the computer this morning, I couldn’t get in touch with Windows at all. Something was stalling the machine 100%!

Disconnecting the USB drive docking and Windows came up (pheew!) without problems. Connect the USB drives again, and boom – everything was stuck.

After many attempts I finally was able to issue the CHKDSK command. It ran for a while, and boink – “An unspecified error occurred”?!?!

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02.06.2019

How to configure BitLocker so it doesn"t need 72 hours to encrypt 2 TB!

Tags: Software Thoughts Configuration
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TL;DR

  • Setting up BitLocker the wrong way can be extermely slow. For example – after 72 hours my 4 TB-drive was only 49% finished!
  • Don’t encrypt harddisks full of files. Start with empty drive and enable BitLocker with “Encrypt used disk space only”
  • Use USB 3 – otherwise BitLocker will be extremely slow!

My backup-regime

Albeit I – as a programmer – shouldn’t care too much about backup (haha!), I have always been at the cowards side and backuped everything. Over the years I have been trying out most ways to backup, such as;

  • 1,44 MB diskettes – stacks of them!
  • CD and DVD burners
  • Zip and Jazz drives
  • External harddisks of all kinds and sizes
  • FTP to my NAS
  • Online cloud backup such as Acronis True Image

Even though most of the technologies above does work to some extent, they have allways meant labor, time and cost of different degrees.

This post is about my latest backup-regime. It consists of an USB harddisk docking station for ordinary internal harddisks;

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My model is the ICY BOX from RaidSonic. It swallows two harddisks, either 3,5” or 2,5”. By using these types of harddisks, the price goes down a whole lot, plus I already have a stack of older disks. One of the really cool features about this box, is that it can clone a harddisk, even without the hosting computer running.

The ability to clone is where the backup-aspect comes to play for me. By using a huge 4 TB harddisk as my main backup disk, I clone this from time to time to another similar 4 TB disk. I clone at intervals such as once a week. Then I store the cloned harddisk outside the premises.

This is where the need to protect the disk comes in. I don’t want unprotected disks lie around.

Searching the net brings up several candidates to protect an external harddisk. If you search around for best solutions to protect your external drive, you see that for example applications such as VeraCrypt or StorageCrypt are mentioned a lot. If you have Windows 10 Professional or Enterprise, you already have Microsoft’s own BitLocker. Note that you also need a fairly new computer with a security module in place (the so called “Trusted Platform Module” or TPM). Note that the BitLocker wizard will tell you if you miss anything.

Protection provided by tools like BitLocker comes with a price – mainly since protection is in the form of encryption. And that is time. Time to encrypt (and later decrypt) your stuff as you move files to and from your harddisk.

Read on to see how I have configured BitLocker now …

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