Hi!
Rising from the ashes doesn't actually feel very good. It hurts and kinda sucks.
My computer died last week after I reformatted it and re-imported all of my backups, and it took me more than a week to properly address the problem. Eventually, I succeeded, and the story is retold after the break.
In the meanwhile, I wanted to pop in, say hi and update briefly, because I'd been so intent on updating more, not less, and then this year happened, and touring, prompting, weeklong illnesses and visitors kept me away from the internet for longer than I feel comfortable with. So I'm off to look for a bedroom or a closet in New York that I can rent through the end of the year, a few more things for Diana Ross and Bon Jovi, both of whom are current PCW clients, and then to format and install everything necessary to run MWS' sales operations on a new computer.
Happy Saturday! So.
Computer Drama.
Last week, I reinstalled Win7 Ultimate 64-bit edition on my computer. Something was strange with the partitioning, though, and the system-reserved partition of 100mb was marked as NTFS and Visible, and it was taking the C: slot. I kinda didn't care, so that was fine, but then a restart told me why I should have cared.
The MBR was fucked, and I had just moved all my backups back to the computer.
WHS has always been useless as a backup solution for me for some reason (I can never access the WHS using the console, which you have to do to get at your backups), but I've been dutifly making the backups figuring that someday WHS would sort itself out and I'd be able to access them. Well, it's not sorted yet, at least. Fuckers.
Anyway, I knew that the data was still on my Hard Drives, so I had to be careful (a low-level format would have been easy to just wipe everything and try again), but with no MBR and no filetype info anymore, the HDD just wasn't showing up. And RAID5 complicated everything, too.
Eventually, a bunch of pre-boot tools, a couple of recovery enviornments and a lot of time allowed me to pull all my personal data (~245GB) to another HDD (which, ironically, is for the new WHS box I'm trying to build), and then I could nuke everything and start again from 3 320GB disks in a RAID5 array. This time around, I kept the backups and everything seems to be going smoother - the 100MB partition is hidden away and not assigned a drive letter, Windows has restarted a bunch of times already with no ill effects.
The only problem is that for some reason, Launchy doesn't work right now. I'll have to fix that, since I use it so intensely now to open things, but I'll get there. There's time.
