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

[xenoglaux]

I think that means you just deleted the raid, not the data.
Also please tell me you took any disks out of the disk drive? Almost everytime I've seen that message it's because someone left a floppy in the drive.

[cris.livejournal.com]

crap, dude. why the hell did that have to happen on the day that I'm leaving town? I've exchanged IM's w/ O'Brien w/ recommended course of action.

Basically, it's a RAID array, which means that all of your data is distributed across multiple disks. If you disconnect one from the set and try to mount it as a singular disk, you'll get garbage. If you format a single disk then you could reconstitute the array from the other three, but if you format two of the disks then the data as a whole is toast. From your description it doesn't sound like you formatted anything, which is good.

Our flight leaves at 5pm tonight. Assuming that the daring pilots of United Airlines choose to fly out through the remnants of Hurrican Ophelia, I will likely be en route to California by the time you get home from work; and we won't touch down until you're well into forgetting this affair with cheesey hip-hop and booze paid for by your friends.

There is always the possibility that our flight will be delayed, in which case, I can call you and try to do some rudimentary troubleshooting over the phone. If it's cancelled, I can come over and take a look. Otherwise, I can call you and COB tomorrow and try to walk your hungover selves through troubleshooting. Or we can all wait until I get back on Wednesday night.

oh yeah, recommended course of action

[cris.livejournal.com]

unplug your box from the wall. pull out all the components, including memory and video cards. there's a possibility that the outage shorted something on your motherboard, which would affect your on-board RAID controller. unplugging everything should clear out the short. If you want, unplug your power supply from the motherboard too.

Then reconnect everything: memory, card, drives, etc. save power for last. Bring it up and try to create the new raid set. If any of the choices seem perilous, feel free to wait until I call you, or until you've got someone who knows RAID sitting with you.

Also, feel free to haul your PC down the street to PCs For Everyone for some tech support. Even if they didn't build it, it's all parts we bought from them, and they should support the stuff.

[silas7.livejournal.com]

Technically, what makes me miserable are people who's computers are off site, and I can't fix what is usually a very easy problem if I could just go there and "lay hands upon it".

Phone support is craptastic.

Being able to go to their house, work on a computer, and drink afterwards is much more enjoyable!

[mishak.livejournal.com]

She stood beside you in her underwear holding your beer holy crap that is indeed awesomeness beyond compare. Did she have the foresight to build a removable front bottom panel into the machine so she can crouch inside in front of you and give you a blowjob while you are playing? Ooh but if she did that the Awesomeness Singularity of your experience would collapse the universe into a single pixel on the game machine and we don't want that yet.

[heatray.livejournal.com]

I fully trust O'Brien to heal my electronic wounds, but I'm going to trying some stuff before he comes over this afternoon anyway. I took a half day today, so I should actually get home around 1:30. Would it be okay if I called you for guidance, since I assume you're not at work today?

do I understand from what you're saying here that if I disconnect three of the drives, format one, and reinstall windows, I should be able to retrieve ALL of my data? Do I risk losing some no matter what I do?

I'm going to try the unplugging, then plugging everything back in thing. I'm good at stuff like that. I'm also going to try the traditional "turn it on when you get home to see if it magically fixed itself, which seems to happen more often than is likely" ritual.

[spitcurl.livejournal.com]

First of all, I would like to reiterate that I have the best girlfriend in the world.

I totally gotta get me ones of those. Not yours, yours was custom designed for you. But a similar model of approaching awesomeness personalized for my own values and criteria.

Way sorry about your hard drives. Hope things can be salvaged!

[heatray.livejournal.com]

Dude, you can drink while you fix my computer, as long as you don't spill. I was even planning picking up some cider in advance of your arrival.

[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.

[panzerkunst.livejournal.com]

I played Shinobi standing up in my living room last night while my girlfriend stood there in her underwear and held my beer.

No comment necessary.

[cris.livejournal.com]

actually taking a half day today because I've had a couple of non-skippable project meetings at work. Those meetings are done and it's all just tieing up loose ends and setting up the "gone fishing" signs, now. I should be home at 12:30. I can come by at 2 and give you an hour or so of support, but I have to be at the airport at 5 (misspoke earlier, my flight leaves at 6:30, not 5).

Anyway, if you reformat one of your drives, install windows and then remount the three drives and try to recreate the array, your computer will likely balk at that. The four disks were created as an array with the fourth disk as a checksum. If you try to recreate that array and retrieve all of the data in the disks without the fourth disk, the computer will refuse to do it. It needs the complete set. I was just saying that if you had formatted one by accident, it won't be the end of the world, as that change can be overwritten as part of the array recreation.

However, if the problem with the disks is that it isn't bootable (which I doubt, otherwise your setup disk would've seen the disks in question) then I could bring a spare hard drive that we will connect separately, install Windows on that, and see if we can salvage your data accordingly.

Anyway, a battery of early morning calling has toasted my cell battery. I'll call you from home when I get in.

[rishikanta.livejournal.com]

seconded