Oh Internet

Whenever I’ve done backups of my home PC, I’ve pretty much just saved things like the website data and my programming projects, and ignored all the mp3s on the machine. The thinking was “Hey, I’ve got all the original CDs, so they’re, like, ready-made backups.”

Then I started thinking “You know, having to re-rip all those CDs would really, really suck.”

So today I bought another hard drive, and planned to do some rsync-y thing for various directories, combined with DVD backups, thereby having a very fast restore mechanism (2nd HDD) as well as a “faster-than-re-ripping” one (DVD) in case both hard drives went flaky at the same time. (Unlikely, but computers hate me, so I’m not ruling out the possibility.)

Anyway, this has lead to two pieces of pain today:

1) Blank Dual-layer DVDs are really damn expensive! I have a dual-layer writer, so I was hoping to be able to cut the number of disks I needed to store in half. Now, while blank CD-Rs are essentially free these days, and normal blank DVDs aren’t much more, Dual-layer discs are pretty pricey. The lowest I found was £2.50/disc, and that was only when buying a stack of 25, so it’s not exactly a cheap option. Oh well, I suppose I’ll be using ordinary DVDs after all.

2) The new hard drive isn’t recognised by the Windows shell. SATA HDD support under Windows XP still seems to be a complete clusterfuck, so I’m left in a situation where:

• Disk is recognised by BIOS.
• Disk is recognised by crazy motherboard RAID controller app.
• Disk is recognised by a Linux liveCD.
• Disc is recognised by the Windows device manager, and is listed as “working correctly”.
• Disc isn’t listed under Windows explorer.

After half an hour of screwing around with various settings I decided that going out to the movies/pub would be a better idea. Since coming back I’ve discovered that large quantities of Gin don’t really make hardware problems any easier to solve.

Does anyone else have 2 SATA drives working under WindowsXP? If so, how much dead chicken waving did it require? Shouldn’t this crap be completely trivial by now?

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 9th, 2005 at 1:07 am and is filed under Gadgetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.