Sio I instal one new device on a 300GB RAID drive and...

[g__day]

God the fun I've had over the last 3 days. It started when I added a Meade DSI Imager and tried to connect it over daisy chained USB cable (with repeater hubs to boost and synchronise the signal).

At some point Windows spat the dummy, either the device wasn't Win XP certified or it somehow got confused. But somewhere on my PC a few bytes went wrong in a important file lying deep in Windows\system32\config\system - a place I'm sure we all go often!

Well my poor PC wouldn't boot. Of course to make matters worse its a 300GB striped RAID array (two drives configure by the motherboards BIOS to look like one big, and twice as fast, hard drive). Trouble is lose the wrong byte on a striped (vs Mirrored) RAID array and you lose everything.

I sighed and tried Windows restore - nope, couldn't even boot to there. Next Boot to last know good configuration, boot to VGA, safe boot. All failures.

Well my main PC has 4 physical hard drives configured (due to the raid) as 3 logical ones. I can multi boot operating systems, so my C drives runs Windows 2000 Professional, D runs Win XP and E is my RAIDed Win XP set up. So I boot to D and look at my E drive. It appears all fine and passes a deep level disk check. So I rename the corrupted file and copy my D drives file to the E drive - bad (but recoverable) mistake that on next boot leads to a blue screen of death.

So I shudder and go to re-install Win XP on E from my Boot CD. Takes about 9 goes to find the right drives for my RAID on floppy disk (else Windows instal doesn't even see the RAID array). You have to press F6 on Win install then insert your floppy (flashing BIOS and load a RAID array drive is the only time a floppy has to be used nowadays) select your driver, press S then continue as normal.

Except normal is not what I see. My E drive is present and large, but not formatted according to Windows instal. Would I like to format this drive? Runs screaming around the room!

Well luckily from booting to D I can see the drive is in good shape, and I don't feel like formatting 200GB of data away! So I boot to C - which can't even see the drive.... I think and find a way to load the RAID drives to Win 2000. Then I re-boot to CD and try again. Yah the drive is there and formatted so I simply re-install Win XP on the RAID array.

So the first time this is a 4 hour, 87 step affair by the timeyou've loaded all device drives, set firewalls, print and scan drivers etc...

I only stuff up the network multifunction and Word 2003, until I relaise my application software load wants a different drive label on my RAID. It wants to see G drive not E drive. A quick play with Partition Magic and a drive map re-label and register re-sync,... and I've stuffed things beyond all recognition and not sure how.....

So do it all again (from 2am - 4am), the full nine yards, recreating users, their multiple e-mail identities copied and re-sync'd, website favourites copied, documents re-linked, iPods re-set etc...

This time I load Office mapping the directory as a network drive and all the scripts run fine. This time I instal my software firewall last so there are not 1,000 port / program checks to validate as I go.

* * * * * * *

All's well that ends well. Finally I am back to where I was Wed evening, no data lost, all apprantently working - and a tad faster and cleaner. But god that was one stress after another when you have normal job and family life to run around this too.

Imagine that 12 hour (elapsed) marathon described above interceded with splicing cable to run my scope remotely from the backyard, reading about USB2 <-> Lan (Cat 5) convertors to try and run a DSI more than 5 metres from my PC, cooking meals, playing with kids, general life basically and it was one stressed day. I took Friday off and got up around 11am cuase I was totally knackered!

So this was Man 1 - Machine 0, but only just! Cheers guys and gals!

[Soldant]

I recently went through a mad dash with HDDs as well, though not with RAID and I won't even bother with RAID. I have enough to manage as it is with lots of little, seemingly insigificant things breaking for no apparent reason.

Isn't it lovely how a relatively mundane task can cause Windows (any version, take your pick) to implode? My dad's computer seems to break every fifteen seconds. Most common is RAM, seems to go through an awful lot of RAM.

I just recently fixed a computer for a person. By "fixed" I actually mean made worse and then totally repaired it. They brought it in and said "Uh yeah it won't connect to the Internets?". I smiled, nodded and decided I'd take a look. After it refused to get an IP from my network, I decided to make sure I hadn't actually screwed around with the DHCP server on the router by using my laptop. Imagine my surprise when suddenly the broken computer randomly restarted, and politely informed me WinXP had died.

After frantically trying to find out what I'd done (I hadn't done anything, I swear, I only looked sideways at it!) and realising that something had gone seriously wrong, I called them up to explain that there could be possible data loss. They said "Oh noes! We have pictures of a friend's 18th that we haven't backed up! Save me!"

The end result?

Spending hours scanning the drive looking for MFTs that pointed to the files that they wanted. Every time I'd recover something, they'd go "Oh yeah I'm sure that's it." but then they'd go "Actually, while we're on the subject, we'd really like this back too..." So I had to start the process again, find another file, and recover it... and get new orders.

The worst part? Since it's a family job, they're not expecting to pay me. I wouldn't even go through this trouble for my own data! Now I'm getting rid of it, either by them picking it up, or scrapping it for parts (hey, ya can never have enough RAM on hand) and ditching the remains in a swamp or something.

I'm on holidays. Can't imagine how I would have done that, as well as uni work and the various other things that demand attention. Whenever something breaks when I'm busy, I either work around it or go somewhere else. Unless I need whatever it is I'm working on to be on my comp... then I'll take a day off. Or cry. Or both. Excellent damage control there g__day!

[Shawn]

g___day...
Sorry mate but your story made me grin..I thought I was the only one that stuff like that happened to...good to see your up and running again...I had a similar, when one of my older drives died of old age, now this PC came off the yatch, and when I built it 5 years ago I had considered the dissimillar metals and electric current in salty moist atmosphere, aside from replacing the switchmode every year or two the system went well and was reliable for automated Nav. but the reason for this was I had siliconed all of the cards onto the main, including CPU, ram sticks, and ribbons to HDD,s, great until one died of old age...I had completely forgotten I had done that to my old smeleron PC, and had looked at favourably for years as to how reliable it was....

[g__day]

:)

Well I'm on my 15th custom built (by myself) PC (including case modding - cooling + air flow). The worst hardware I ever had was a Promise Technologies Caching IDE hard drive controller. Basically a 286 + 16MB or RAM between my system and its hard drives.

Total piece of **** that cause disk errors, bad ones, every few weeks. An this was the good old days of Window 3.0, Win 95 and Win NT 3.5 argh. Forget plug and play and re-mappable I/O address and IRQ assignments. You had to guess to avoid conflicts and if your guess was wrong your system halted and it required a total operating system re-instal. It took about 300 hours to get it operational!