It all started with a little game. my wife bought me Doom 3. Unfortunately
my system couldn't play it - my video card (among other things) just
wouldn't cut it. So I put it away and thought "well, I'll make sure the
next computer I get will play it".
Then I got an expected coupla thousand dollars.
So, on a whim, I bought a spankin' MSI GT6800 Ultra. Then I needed to buy
a new power supply to feed it. They both installed great - no problems at
all. Then I realized that my motherboard only provided AGP 4x. Not a huge
thing, but enough to give me the bug since there were several other things
that irritated me about my old board (my external firewire hard drive didn't
like the onboard firewire ports for some reason, I couldn't upgrade my RAM,
the onboard sound port configuration sucked, I had to hack the bios to get
full RAID capabilities, etc).
So I looked around and found a Soyo P4I875P Dragon 2 v1.0 - it's really
sweet. I wanted a board that could take my existed RAID arrays (an 80 Gig
mirror and a 200 Gig mirror) without hacking the BIOS (many board only allow
one array to be created). This board actually has two IDE RAID channels,
two normal IDE channels, two SATA RAID channels and two normal SATA channels
- and you can use nearly all of them at once! (Not that I would be, but
it's nice to know it's there).
The board also has onboard USB 2.0 and firewire, AGP 8x, Dual-channel DDR
(which means I can upgrade my RAM without throwing the old RAM away) and
comes with a nice 3.5" front-mounted firewire and memory card reader. Great
board all around.
I backed up my entire life to an Maxtor external 200 gig drive (this will
become important later) and set about the surgery.
Anyway - that's when the hell started.
I tore apart my old machine, swapped the boards (I even spent the time and
loom-wrapped all of the power-supply cables and the spliced some fan wires
to clean things up). I got everything in perfectly. until the very end -
then the 24-pin power plug would not go in. It was like pressing it into a
stone it was so stiff. I knew one of the pins was messed up but I could see
it (I suspect now that one of the motherboard pins had some flash on it).
So I took a screwdriver and I meticulously widen the sockets for all the
pins. after about an hour of fiddling I finally got the damn thing to seat,
but not without a sickening "crack" as it finally popped in.
Nothing appeared broken however so I started setting things up. The first
thing noticed was that I had obviously widened some sockets too much - the
power kept cutting out every time any of the wires where brushed. So I
pulled the plug and then spent another hour squeezing the pins tighter.
This finally took and the power seemed fine.
Now I started plugging everything in and installing windows. The first
thing I noticed was that the onboard RAID (by ALI, which I'd never used
before) was acting odd. I had two 80 gig drives and two 200 gigs drives. I
both up and mirrored (type 1) arrays which seemed to work but windows kept
showing me both 80's (not supposed to happen). Finally I figured out that
my 80's (which worked fine under the Highpoint RAID of the old MoBo) were
different PIO modes. The ALI chipset apparently didn't like that much.
So I took my bike down to Staples to pick up two new 80 gig drives (not the
cheapest place, but the closest). A great bit of luck: they've a sale going
on: I could get two 200 Gigs, the same model as the two already in my
system, for only $10 more. I do it. So now I've got a total of four 200
drives - meaning I could do RAID 10 (striping and mirroring). Very neat.
The drives install with no trouble and I set up a beastly 379gig (after
formatting) array. However I still see two drives in windows set up! One
200 Gig drive and one 379 Gig drive! Why is it doing this? Why is that
RAID controller showing me one of the 200's as a separate drive? So I
fiddle. and I faddle. and a tweak. I try deleting the "extra" partition. I
try swapping cables, low-level format the array (FDisk, by the way doesn't
see the extra drive). This goes on until about Midnight.
Then lighting strikes - could Windows set up be seeing the external drive?
The firewire drive? I try unplugging it - and lo and behold that's it! All
that time wasted for that! A lesson: don't plug in extra stuff until you're
done installing Windows!
So, anyway I get windows installed the first time but notice that my system
disk is "J:" - weird. I dig a little and find out that Windows in treating
the memory card reader breakout box as four drives, but assigning them
higher priority. So I bite the bullet, unplug the thing and reinstall
windows. Now I've got a more normal view of the world. I plug the box back
in and it works fine. After I partition my Array as four 50 Gig and two 100
Gig drives I've got drive letters up to O: (a coupla of virtual CD Drives
and the external drive later and I'm up to "R:"). ;^)
Now I try to install my network. I needs my network. I plug in the cable
(the old cable) - I know that the pressure clasp has broken off, but it's
always worked fine before. Not now. No lights on the motherboard or the
router. I dig out my Cat 5 tested and it says "short". So I swear and then
perform the tedious (at least to my ham hands) of putting new ends on the
cable. Still a short? What's up? I dig out another cable out of my
laptop bag - a short as well. Turns out the battery in the tester is as
good as dead.
I don't have any nine-volts in the house. I take the battery out of the
smoke detector in the baby's room (you've got to have priorities). All the
cables test out fine but still no joy on the motherboard. No lights, no
nothing. I spend an hour fiddling with the BIOS (says it's enabled) and
trying various things - no joy. Everything else on the motherboard works
perfectly.
I Google the problem and see several posts from people that say the onboard
NICs often give up the ghost. Doesn't make me feel any better, but I can
see it's true. I decide to barrel ahead despite this - but I have to pull
the network card from my server (it's the only PCI NIC in the house) to do
so. It works perfectly first time without drivers.
So anyway. I'm feeling pretty good. It's after 3 AM, but everything seems
to be fine (I'm in denial about the NIC). All of the basic stuff is
working. All of the drivers install fine all of the non-NIC hardware works
perfectly and there seems to be no other problems. So I decide to just
install my external hard disk so that I could transfer my life to the new
drives the next day.
I plug the drive into the motherboard and hear a satisfying "ba-dump"
connection noise. But I don't see the drive. I see my firewire web cam so
I know that something's getting through (the cam is daisy-chained to the
drive) but no drive joy. I check the drivers, install the useless "Maxtor
One-touch" software, plug it into a second port, try the front port, etc.
No joy.
Then I decide to check Windows disk manager. weird. I see a 200 Gig drive.
but it's all unallocated space. I know it's not unallocated space. it's
allocated to store my life. There must be something wrong.
(At this point some of you will, no doubt, have put two and two together.
In my defense it was close to four in the morning so I wasn't thinking
completely evenly).
In a huff I pull out my laptop and plug in the drive. still "unallocated
space". That can't be right? In a panic I sneak into my son's room and
plug it into his computer. still "unallocated space". It IS right!
Finally it dawns on me: I delete the partition when I thought the RAID
controller was acting up. I nonchalantly deleted my (and family's) life!
The pit of my stomach grew cold. I immediately started mentally cataloging
things: 6 years of family pictures, 15 gigabytes of music, quite literally
10's of thousands of e-books (all meticulously organized), hundreds of video
files (it took me FOREVER to get all the espisodes of "The Tick"!), all my
work for the past few years!
The thought kept running through my head: she's going to kill me. She went
to bed saying "do whatever you want, but I make sure that you don't lose
anything". I was dirt.
I decided to look at recovery options. I downloaded several trial recovery
tools but they all were going to take hours and then I would have to piece
files together by hand. Finally I got it right: I looked up "undelete
partition". I find this:
http://www.cgsecurity.org//index.html?testdisk.html
<http://www.cgsecurity.org/index.html?testdisk.html>
Supposedly I can undelete the partition! (This is possible since I hadn't
touched the drive at all since.) The tool seems to do exactly what I need.
but the documentation seems to have been written by monkeys. I can't
understand it very well. My panic is rising the further into the tool I get
and then finally with a prayer to a non-existent God (when an atheist prays
you know it's bad) I hit "write" - I realize from the documentation that
this will either destroy everything or save everything.
Luckily it's the latter.
I've rarely felt that kind of relief in my life. Even when my wife was
giving birth I I felt more confused than anything else - I didn't really
know what was going on so I couldn't get that relieved when everything
turned out okay. In this case I was intimately familiar with every aspects
of what I had done. I was solely responsible - it wasn't hardware failure
or a software bug - it was all my fault. It was like I (a fat man) had been
standing on my own chest and then suddenly leaped off.
Even tho it was dawn now and I was exhausted I stay up and transferred all
of the data off the external drive to the mirrored array. I feel safe
again.
Now I've just got to decide if I'm going to bother return this motherboard
just for the NIC. The consumer in my says "yes, definitely" but the geek in
me says "but you've already done all this work. and everything is working
just fine! You idiot - leave it alone! Haven't you screwed up enough?"
Jim Davis
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