advice and stuff

[heatray5d]

First of all, I would like to reiterate that I have the best girlfriend in the world. This is a verifiable fact. The next issue of Science! is even publishing a study by respected Harvard girlfriendologist Harry Butts with that conclusion. If your girlfriend gets to close to mine, she will immediately turn into a pillar of salt because of how much more awesome my girlfriend is.

I'd like to follow that up with a shout out to spriggan and sarcasmchasm, as well as tegin's mom, all of whom are very nearly as awesome as Tegin is. cris gets an honorable mention. Holy friggin' crap, you guys. Jumpin' Jesus on His Holy Trampoline. They built me a fuckin' arcade machine. I played Shinobi standing up in my living room last night while my girlfriend stood there in her underwear and held my beer. I must have been Ghandi or the guy who invented ninjas something in a past life to deserve this much awesomeness.

Now, you and I both know that there is a universal constant of joy. I had become, for a moment, a joyous singularity; a point of infinite awesomeness from which not even hot lava can escape. Which is why the power went out in my neighborhood last night.

When it came back on, I decided to post pictures to my livejournal, only to discover that my computer no longer believed it had hard drives (Disk Boot Failure, Please Insert System Disk). When I went into Setup, I was told that my RAID set was Invalid. However, Setup could see all four of my drives.

Since I had already had three beers, and the option was right there, I deleted the Invalid RAID set and tried creating a new one, which resulted in nothing happening. The drives didn't spool or crackle or make any of those drive noises, so I assume I didn't format anything (I hope). When I tried booting from the Windows CD again, it still insisted I ahd no hard drives.

This afternoon, I'm going to try unplugging all four drives, then plugging them back in, and booting. If that doesn't do anything, I'll unplug three of the drives, attempt to install windows on the fourth, and then try to rebuild everything from there. I should have help later in the day in the person of silas7, but he does shit like this all day and it makes him miserable, so any advice that might make it all easier would be greatly appreciated.

I would like very much to not lose what I hope is still on my drives, as I haven't backed them up, ever. I have learned a lesson.

Comments

[heatray.livejournal.com]

We didn't even put a floppy drive in this machine in an attempt to avoid just that problem. I even removed the Dawn of War CD from the drive, in case the computer was trying to boot from it for some reason.

I had a similar problem a few months ago when the machine tried to boot from my mp3 player for some reason, but it wasn't hooked up last night. I thought at first it might be trying to boot from my camera, but clearly that was not the problem.