Disaster

So, the summer term started yesterday and I moved back up into halls on Sunday. After plugging in all my computer bits and pieces I turned it on only to find that the mouse didn't move.

Oh, what a catastrophe this turned out to be.

Switching the mouse to another USB port prompted a Found New Hardware dialogue box, so I reinstalled the drivers and then thought I'd reboot since the computer seemed to be very slow to respond to anything. Eventually I lost patience and went for the reset button, which in turn on the reboot prompted my RAID array to start rebuilding itself, since it had detected an improper shutdown. The rebuild slowed down the computer monumentally, and I was advised to leave it alone for another 1-2 hours to let it sort itself out.

1-2 hours later, I noticed that the hard drive activity light had stopped flashing, so I continued reading for another half hour and then went to reboot the computer. It still seemed to have geological response times, so this took about 15 minutes or so. Whereupon it began rebuilding all over again.

I phoned Kevin, who had earlier assured me that if time was pressing there were things that could be done to enable me to access my data sooner rather than later. Time was indeed pressing, since it was now almost 4pm and I had to write the last 300 words of an essay ready to hand in the following morning, so I disconnected the second drive, told the BIOS there was no RAID array, and rebooted. It never even got as far as loading the Windows splash screen, just sat there apparently doing nothing once it had decided to boot from the hard drive. Swapping the two drives around made it a little better — I was presented with an "improper shutdown" Windows screen, but choosing any of the options, even plain Safe mode, caused the computer to think about it for a couple of seconds and then reboot.

Not so good.

Lots of variations and trial and error of the above happened before we decided it was time to try reinstalling Windows. Luckily, to partly protect myself from this sort of thing, I have Windows installed on a separate partition to anything else, so during the installation, I thought, I could just format C: and install there. Unfortunately, the Windows installation couldn't detect my SATA hard drives and asked for a floppy disk with appropriate drivers. A floppy disk. Which I didn't have.

The next bright idea was to get the array to rebuild from within its boot-up configuration screen (rather than from within Windows), but hopes were dashed and confusion reigned when I waited for the "Press F4 to enter RAID utility" line in the start-up, but it never appeared. It had been there earlier...

By about this time it was approaching 6pm and I reluctantly accepted that I would have to head down to the computer labs and rewrite the 1500 or so words of my essay that I'd already done. So I scooted down there and wrote the whole thing at about exam-speed — 1850 words in about two hours.

Later, having returned to my ever-more-frustrating computer, I found that Kevin had realised the configuration utility prompt wasn't appearing in boot-up because we'd told the BIOS that it wasn't a RAID array... changing that finally enabled me to get into the program and start the rebuild. Yay!

It looked like it was progressing at a reasonable pace and would take just over an hour for the whole thing. Which was good, and might leave me with a working computer by 11pm. Except that it froze at 79%. The hard drive was still doing things though, so I left it alone only to find 40 minutes later that it had given up and concluded that I had an invalid set of disks. Ahh. Ahhhhh. This is the Linux partition causing this. When I installed Fedora, we couldn't get it to accept the RAID drivers, so (AIUI) Linux only ever wrote data to one disk instead of both. So when the array tried to rebuild it found this massive discrepancy between the two, and concluded they were too badly synced to rebuild. Hmm.

This led to loading up the Fedora installation CD to use the disk partitioning tool to delete the Linux partitions on each drive. However, once I'd told it what I wanted to do, it objected and told me that it couldn't proceed with the "installation" since I hadn't created a Linux partition... Throughout the process it was complaining about Input/output errors on /dev/sda (the first hard drive), but it still continued through the process when I told it to Ignore.

*sigh*

I had the bright idea of stepping into Linux rescue mode with the installation disc, but once it offered me a prompt I didn't really know what to do with it. And I'm not entirely sure how successful deleting the Linux partition from within Linux would be, so I abandoned it.

The long and short of it (well, it's turned out to be the long of it... hmm... or maybe the long and short put together to make it super-long?) is that a new hard drive's been ordered. Kevin managed to track down the exact model on eBuyer, but since neither of us have an account with them they'd only ship the first order to a credit card billing address (so, either Surrey or Essex, not terribly helpful since I'm 100-150 miles away from either). So Kevin had to ask a eBuyer-account-holding-friend to order it for me and get it sent here instead.

Well, the drive was ordered on Monday and next-day delivery was paid for, though as of last night (Tuesday) it was apparently still sitting in a depot somewhere. Our post only gets delivered at around 1pm-2pm, so possibly about now it's sitting in out post room waiting for me to pick it up...

In the meantime, I've been astounded at just how much I rely on my computer. Without my computer I have no essay-writing or -printing ability, little exam-revision ability (since a lot of the revision material is online), no TV, no DVDs, no episodes of Buffy/Angel/The West Wing which I'm working my way through (again) at the moment, no email, no newsgroups, no blogs, no news, and no ability to multi-task, which my attention-wandering mind appreciates. I would have music through my iPod, but I ran down the battery early on Sunday, and didn't bring the separate charger but only the one that lets you plug it into the FireWire port on the computer, so I'm out of music too.

So, just books then. I know I'm a bit of a bookworm, but I feel like a lapsed bookworm recently. Since starting uni I haven't read more than about one book every 8-10 days or so, and last year I mainly read on the train to and from work. Yesterday I read 230 pages to finish my Jasper Fforde book, and then another 80 or so of the next book. If I keep this up I'll be running out of books that I've brought with me fairly soon, and then I'll have to... what? Buy some more I suppose :-)

Back to reality

As the great disaster turned out, I've had a working computer for almost a week now. Look, I know that means it's taken me almost a week to blog about it. That's not the point. *cough*

Last Wednesday I received a nice blank hard drive in the post and promptly set about swapping it with the drive we believed was corrupted. This activity was postponed for a bit when I realised I had no adequate screwdriver in my possession and I ended up ruining my tweezers before finding out that the penknife in my large Swiss-Army-knife-type-thing was ideal for undoing the hard drive screws. Excellent.

The obvious thing to do was to enter the RAID utility and rebuild from the original drive (secondary, if you're still following) to the new blank one. Cables and drive numbers printed on the motherboard were re-checked to make sure I had them the right way around, and I set it going. I had to first delete the current RAID set and create a new one, since it wouldn't let me just rebuild right away.

When it had finished and I tried booting, what happened next (a DISK BOOT FAILURE) was not unlike what might have happened if, for example, the source and destination drives had been mixed up during the rebuild of the array. Copying the blank one onto the one with all my data.

Oh. And hmm. And bother.

I installed Windows on the new drive anyway (noting with narrowed eyes the 163840MB unpartitioned space with no data), and spent the evening revelling in having a working computer once more, and downloading the plethora of programs I seem to need just to make things usable.

I was rather angry at the RAID utility since I was 500% certain — no, more! — that I'd selected the correct source and destination drives according to which drive was connected to which port on the motherboard. In fact, though, what had happened — Kevin assured me, though I'm not sure I fully believed him until he proved it to me at the weekend — was that the data was intact and had been copied across correctly. However, deleting the previous RAID array had wiped the partition tables, meaning it could be tricky to actually access the data.

On Saturday Kevin performed some voodoo magic and retrieved my data for me from the old corrupted drive, which was thankfully only corrupted on the Windows partition. This he did by way of a live Knoppix CD and a lot of patience wrangling with German menus and error messages (the first Knoppix ISO we grabbed from the Warwick network was a German one, and by the time Kevin decided that what with error messages and such he'd be better off with an English version, getting back into Windows was a little tricky because he'd just wiped the user data. Fun ensued).

We found it got quite confusing trying to clarify which disk we were talking about at any time, so in the end we named them Tom (the original corrupted disk), Dick (the original mirror of Tom which accidentally had its partition table wiped) and Harry (the new drive with the interim copy of Windows etc.). We were calling them A, B and C at one stage, but that led to sentences like, "We'll wipe the D drive on C and leave the C drive alone and then copy D from A onto C..."

So. The data partition on Harry was formatted into FAT32, so that Knoppix was happy with it. Then Kevin grabbed my original data from Tom and copied it across to Harry. Once we'd rebooted, rebuilt the array (from Harry onto Dick — thankfully went okay that time) and things in Windowsland were relatively sane again, we converted the drive back to NTFS to please MS.

Things are still a little flakey, I'll probably reinstall Windows at the end of the week to try and sort it out. At the moment I have user data and applications from a previous copy of Windows, and they seem to be a little confused. So, there's flakiness. iTunes complains about an install script every time I open it, IE complains about an XML parser every time I close it, I've had to reinstall a fair few of my original applications (though frequently they refuse to uninstall since this copy of Windows doesn't believe they were installed in the first place...) and things are a little bit screwy generally. Still, given that the only thing I actually lost in the end was my font collection, I'm not too bothered :-)

Reboot

I hesitate to say "ta-da", but... but wait, no I don't. Do you know how long it's taken me to do a redesign?

"Ta-da!" (Go on, take a peek outside your RSS reader :-) )

When I say it's taken a long time, that's less in the sense of the time taken to implement this design (a few days, on and off) and more in the sense that it's well over 18 months since I first started fiddling with redesigns. I think this is the fourth or fifth redesign since February 2003, and the only one to actually make it from my hard drive onto the server.

It's not the most accomplished design — it's not even the most accomplished of my designs, at least in my head — but I wanted to show off the pretty background photo of the (bent back) tulips that Kevin got me for Valentine's Day last year (previously seen here and also in my favicon).

This was the first time I'd sat down and seriously CSSed for at least a year (save only for the nine-page CSS tutorial I wrote for the web team I worked with last year and, by God, one day I'll put it up on bentbacktulips too) so I was pleased to find I still had the knack. What I had forgotten, though, was how much of a pain Internet Explorer is. It's not as though I was sitting there trying to come up with snazzy under-used unsupported features to use, but there was quite a large range of things that IE completely borked at (well it would, since it has no support for them). Things such as:

• min-width
• max-width
• position: fixed;
• PNG alpha transparency
• background-attachment:fixed; (on more than one element other than the body)
• :before and :after
• in conjunction with the content property

It wasn't too wild about some of my floats either. I decided not to sacrifice any design bits because they don't work in IE or cause the design to break — I just added a small handful of extra CSS rules at the bottom of the stylesheet just for IE.

The wide-ranging sets of supported CSS by various browsers, and the fact that I also used the proprietry -moz-border-radius property (a proprietry property? there's got to be a better way of saying that), means that the website looks reasonably different in at least Mozilla/Firefox, Opera 7/8, Opera 6, IE6 and IE5, probably Safari too. But I don't mind because I didn't spend hours and hours hacking my way to find workarounds for all of them, and though it may not be perfect it's certainly good enough.

You can see I still have my penchant for floating boxes and fixed backgrounds :-) I was trying to avoid the all-too-ubiqitous Wordpress look which seems to be all the rage au courant, and also the annoying (to me) trend of teeny tiny fonts. It seems like I'm seeing it more and more frequently now, particularly on web designers' websites. When I encounter the phenomenon it usually makes me bump up my font size at least twice in protest (in much the same way as a car tailgating me while I'm doing 32mph in a 30 zone is always guaranteed to make me slow down to exactly 30mph). (Was that a weird analogy? I can't tell; it was 3:30am when I wrote it down.)

There's one effect that I rather like — on the left, the floating boxes seem to be semi-transparent when they float over the tulips photo (not for you, IE users) but opaque when they travel over the logo. I had tried using semi-transparent backgrounds, or even the Mozilla and IE transparency filters, but the logo in the background showed through too much and was annoying when trying to read the text over it. So, what did I do? Well, obviously, I cheated :-) It's a complex spiral-type thing — the second image makes the boxes seem semi-transparent.

In summary, then — thank you, CSS Reboot, for finally motivating me beyond my eternal laziness.