Friday, October 5, 2007

Lessons in Geekdom

My old DFI Lanparty motherboard died in its sleep several months ago, forcing me to limp along on my cheapo laptop until I could scrape up the spare cash to build a replacement desktop unit.

This was a non-trivial upgrade -- the industry has cast aside the AGP video format in favor of PCI Express. In order to make that jump, my shopping list required a new motherboard and video card. In for an inch.... let's also get a new CPU and memory worthy of this new threshold.

But this is a tale about SATA and RAID. On my old system, I had kept a lot of data on a pair of 150GB SATA drives, which were combined into a single, 300GH, striped, RAID 0 array. As I waited peacefully and unawares for my upgrade, I thought that my data on the volume I called "Stripey" was safe and sound. Technically, I suppose that it still is. The problem, I discovered, is that my new motherboard will not recognize an imported RAID 0 -- I must initialize both drives if I wish to use them again in that fashion.

It turns out that there is some software out there, which is designed to recover data from RAID 0 drives. Unfortunately, this software is not free or even cheap. My data is certainly not worth that expense, anyway.

Ah, but wisdom comes with age (though often too late to do any good). With the advent of rewiteable DVDs, I actually began to practice the seemingly arcane art of data backups. I'm resigned to the fact that Stripey is going to have to die. For, while my backups are not perfect or all-encompassing, they're good enough to get me by.

Post Script: How is is that in my pile of backup DVDs I do not have a copy of the intall program for the backup software?

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