Not a car problem but one I came across several years ago while at a customer’s office. When doing a tape backup, not only would the backup stop at a certain point, but the tape drive would cause the computer to reboot. I worked with Microsoft support, Dell support, even the tape drive vendor’s support. We could duplicate the problem 100% of the time. Along the way, I replaced the tape drive, the tape drive cable, the SCSI host adapter for the tape drive, the system board, the computer's back plane, the power supply the cooling fans, even the video display card and ultimately the hard drive, and the network interface card. Still the problem persisted. Microsoft gave up. Dell gave up. I gave up using the tape drive and had the customer buy another hard drive, put it on a different machine and simply copied data from the problematic machine to the other one. Problem was side stepped.

A little more than a year later I was talking with someone at MS support about a different topic, and mentioned the previous one, and said it was never solved. He did some research and found a case with a similar operating system where a pipe “|” character in a file name caused a similar problem. I went to the customer’s office the next day and looked for a file with a pipe character as part of the file’s name. Sure enough, in a directory with over a thousand files on it, one file had a pipe character. I renamed the file to remove the character, duplicated the test, and the problem was solved. I renamed the file again and put the pipe character back and the problem resumed. That was it! Never did get an explanation why this caused the failure of the backup software....

__________________
...Tracy

'00 ML320 "Casper"
'92 400E "Stella"