Have you ever had one of those days where you just want to give up your job in computers/technology and go get a job at Walmart? I had one of those today, and I’m not even at work. I was just trying to setup some virtual machines to work on some projects at home, and nothing went right.
First I tried to install 8GB of ram into my main workstation at home. That failed and took me a couple of hours to figure out that I needed to manually adjust the memory timings and voltage in order to get all 4 stick of ram to work. Along the way I thought I would update the bios to see if that work, and ended up removing my raid-1 array from existence. I didn’t see the warning on Gigabyte’s page about re-enabling the Raid setting, but I did see it in a forum post, however I forgot to actually do this. So on the one hand it’s party my fault, but on the other hand I think it’s poor design that the Raid setting get’s set to disabled on a bios update.
I didn’t realize that I was missing my raid array for 4 hours or so. In the meantime, one of my other computers blue screened on me with a stop code of 1a while trying to copy a base VM image. Nice. I think I’ll leave that alone for awhile.
Actually I was able to make some decent progress on getting my VM’s setup on my primary workstation, until I realized I had a G drive, that had the exact same contents as my mounted data partition, that used to be my Raid array. Oh crap. Rebooted and re-enabled the raid setting, and the array definition was still intact thankfully. Back into windows and I still have a G drive and my mounted partition is no more.
Spent some time and a couple of reboots to get my Raid array mounted to an “empty folder” like I had it before. The raid monitoring utility said that everything was working, but I started getting errors popping up saying that I needed to run chkdsk. Again, several reboots later, I was able to run chkdsk and not get any errors. Final problem was that allot of my NTFS security permissions got messed up as well. I think it’s all better now, as I was able to perform a defrag, and I’m running the raid application’s analyze and repair utility as well. If I run into any more problems I’m going to have to backup 500GB worth of data and reformat.
Now on another PC, I was trying to setup Virtual Server, and the VM won’t start, and pretty much crashes virtual center. Guess I’ll try VMWare server instead.
Oh, and since I have a share on my primary workstation, which resides on my Raid Array that is part of my Windows Media Center library, Windows Media Center was pretty much non-functional until after it was back online. It just sat there trying to connect to a non-existent share….brillant. How do you explain that one to the wife?