Medias of the Moment


©opyright 2003 krunk4ever.com

 

Get Firefox!

 

Password:

09.21.2005 -

thought of the day: learnt this from monster - oyakodon (or oyakodonburi) is a japanese cuisine for chicken and egg on rice. literally it means parent and child donburi. and the reason for that name is because the chicken is the parent of the egg. hence parent and child donburi!

wow! how long has it been since my last update. long story short (you'll get the long story later), i had data corruption all over my hdds (notice the plural).

since i've been literally gone for over 2 weeks, i've been asked when my blog would be updated many many times and i wasn't able to give a definte answer, but hopefully it should return to normal after today.

so with so much backlog, all the stuff will be spread among next few entries.

welp, as i mentioned earlier, i had data corruption everywhere. you could say i've lost about 30% of my data. it all started when i got my raid card (it's not the raid card that caused before you start jumping to conclusions). so i got some new hardware as i mentioned: 4x160GB SATA Seagate drives, Promise FastTrack S150 SX4-M, AMD Sempron 2800+ w/ mobo, and Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro. so i decided to swap the cpu and motherboard (since my old motherboard didnt support the 2800+) and use the older hardware in my fileserver (since there really isn't any need to have a good technology in a system serving files). so i backed up everything, formatted my C: drive, and reinstalled windows xp with the new cpu, mobo, and video card. everything was working fine, then i started to notice some problems.

>scan disk would be activated everytime i boot up and always finding errors to fix. so i first noticed my "download directory" had a bunch of files that no longer opened, videos that no longer played, text files that became gibberish. then i noticed my entire itunes library was rendered unplayable. then i started noticing anime episodes wouldn't play and etc. i thought maybe the cpu or motherboard may have been causing this, but swapping the originals back had the same problem. actually i can confirm the cpu in the new mobo had the problem, i didnt really test the the old mobo since it was hanging on the side of my case, i didn't bother doing much swapping back and forth and did a quick bootup and scandisk found some problems. now that i think about it, i'm pretty sure those problems were caused by the new config and the old mobo just did a scandisk as instructed and found information. so i was doing many different tests and i noticed the more i download into 1 directory, the more new stuff got corrupted. i was pretty pissed at this point. why can't stuff just work! at first i thought it was just 1 harddrive, then 2, and then it turned out every drive besides my boot drive was getting data corruption and new ones were appearing too.

at first i didn't doubt my ide card since i've been using that for about 3 years already and it was fine before i changed mobos. plus at first (since i didnt bother watching the archived anime episodes i had) i didnt know my other drives were getting corrupted either so the ide card wasn't a good candidate. but when i hit an episode of detective conan i couldn't play, all hell broke loose. i redownloaded an episode but then i noticed new ones were getting corrupted and the same story over again. finally i decided to stick the drives directly into the ide controllers on the motherboard and BAM the data corruption was gone. in fact, some of the old stuff that "was" corrupted, started working again. at this moment, i wented to break the ide card into millions of pieces. most of the stuff were recoverable. though i haven't really checked my documents, but all my anime episodes and movies have been restored besides 1 episode of detective conan which i hate yet to find.

so with this problem gone, it was time to build my fileserver. i had originally ordered an intel raid card off ebay, but i received an empty box. apparently the seller had a couple and forgot he used one and sold me a box with a cd, manual, and pci brackets. but thank god, i had a backup plan. actually ordered a 2nd raid card (as noted above, it's a promise fasttrack s150 sx4-m with 128mb of ecc ram) off AT FS/T. this card came a few days later just on the day i figured the hdd problem. the reason i needed an ide card for my main computer (not the raid card) was because i have 4 hdds and 2 disc drives and 4 ide ports isn't enough to handle that (i noticed new mobos come with 6 or 8 sata ports which is nice!). setting the server up was quite painless until i booted up, it wouldn't show me the raid config screen! so i tried a different pci slot. same problem. turns out the raid card needs to be in the 1st or 2nd slot for it to get recognized. welp, creating the raid array (raid 5) was quite painless. it was done in less than a minute and then i began my installation of windows 2003. and everything's been working fine since then.

so i've moved most of my movies, animes, digipix (not sure if any of those got corrupted), etc onto this array. it's a raid 5 3+1 config so outta the 4x160GB drives, i have 480GB of space I can actually use. since i lost my entire itunes library, i had to restore what was left from my ipod. transferring the music from my ipod to itunes wasnt hard. what was hard was having to re-rate them and that took hours and i was still less than half complete. not really sure what prompted me to do so, but i decided to check my old itunes library and guess what! all my mp3s worked! pretty amazing and the ratings are still intact since the library file is fine.

oooh, i forgot, i have pictures! so lemme show you those before i move on. first is my fileserver: (click to enlarge)

and then my ipod nano:

the ipod nano is so cute and tiny and sexy!!! i haven't tested the limit yet on how long it can play since you heard about my itunes incident a few paragraphs above. and from the pix, you can probably tell how messy my room was. it's all clean now.

oh yah, as you can see in the fileserver images, i had to ghettorig a floppy from my main computer to the fileserver. reason was win2k3 didn't recognize my raid card and i needed to load the drivers from floppy (why doesnt win2k3 or even winxp allow me to load drivers from a cd?). but yah, i'm pretty happy with the results now.

tune in tomorrow for my poker stories...




comments | edit | delete

show ip


delete comment

name: phox
posted at: 09.22.2005 - 08:48AM

wonder why you have those tissues by your computer in that one pix (6th pix of the nano series pix)


delete comment

name: krunk
posted at: 09.25.2005 - 07:41AM

re: tissue comment. laziness has its rewards. =)


name:

verify text: 72yYRUBd