Gosport Weather status.

This post has been written to explain what has happened to the Gosport Weather service and when it is likely to return to normal service.

Unfortunately on the morning of Wednesday 12th March 2014 the computer used by Gosport Weather suffered severe problems with the weather software and forecast software both freezing and Windows 8.1 becoming slow and unresponsive. 

The problem was investigated but it soon became clear that by looking at the error logs and running disk checks that the primary hard drive was beginning to fail. Due to the amount of important data held on the hard drive including all of our weather data,settings and website files from 2010 attention turned from updating the website to getting the data off the hard drive before it completely failed. 

Unfortunately on Saturday we detected that the drive had started emitting the 'click of death' which is a clicking noise emitted when the the head actuator repetitively tries to recover from one or more errors. These sounds can be the heads repetitively loading or unloading, or they can be the sounds of the actuator striking a stop. This  is commonly associated with a hard drive that has failed.

The data logger used within the weather station console can only store 42 hours of data and therefore a complete hard drive failure would mean that the data collected so far would of been lost forever.

The weather data and software settings have been transferred to another computer which is being used to download data from the weather station until a replacement weather computer can be found. 

It is hoped that today (Sunday 16th March 2014) we will be going to look at a new computer and if it meets with our approval we should be able to transfer the weather data to the new machine. Once the weather data is back and the software is working correctly we will program windows to automatically startup and shutdown at the usual times. The next step will be to get the weather forecast software back up and running along with the automatic email program used to send the evening forecast.

Once all the software and data is set up we will begin a period of testing which we hope to complete by the end of Tuesday 18th March 2014. If all software performs as expected Gosport Weather will return to normal service and attention will turn back to our other projects including the soil project which has been delayed due to this problem.

We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused and thank you for your patience whilst we resolve this issue.

For the latest on this issue please visit us on Facebook. If you have any question relating to this or any other aspect of our service please email us at: webmaster@gosportweather.co.uk