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 :-)