After nearly two weeks of unsuccessfully trying to restore the HighPoint RAID mystery sector information that ties my partitions together in a RAID 0 bond of harmony, I’m going to chuck it (the RAID controller, not the computer).  Serves me right for trying to do RAID on the cheap.  The new plan is to attach the drives as Plain Old Dumb Drives(tm) to the PATA ports, restore the XP partitions to a PlainOldDumbDrive, hope it works, and then fire up XP using any means necessary just long enough to export all proprietary databases to open ones (iTunes ratings, Thunderbird filters/junk/prefs, etc.).  Then I most certainly will be rebuilding the machine.

You know, I’ve had this XP partition/setup since 2001?  I guess that’s a testament to the stability of XP.  If you don’t act like a fucktard, XP won’t act like a fucktard back at ya.  I’ve had nearly no issues with XP in 6 straight years, which was a refreshing change from Windows 9x.  What prompted me to purchase Windows XP in 2001 was an experience in Windows 98 that almost had me damaging equipment:  I lost the ability to drag icons.  That wasn’t what made me mad, though: What made me furious was that, a week later, it fixed itself and started working again.  That’s just retarded.

So anyway… the new approach in trying to manage all this is System Rescue CD, brought to you by the fine folks who created partimage.  It’s a Linux rescue CD (a “liveCD” that you can boot directly and use without installing Linux) that works pretty damn well.  It’s taken Linux a long time to figure out how to do NTFS properly, but sysrescuecd distribution works well enough that you can mount a SAMBA/Windows share to a local directory and back up entire partitions to it.  I’m in it right now (running FireFox to add this weblog entry, no less).  In one window I’m copying my Acronis backup images to one of the PlainOldDumbDrives (so that multiple restores will take 30 minutes instead of 5 hours); in the other window I’m trying to figure out why I’m getting only 50mbit/s over my 100mbit/s FD network.  It’s plain, but functional, and can even boot off of a 256MB USB key.

All this because Apple couldn’t keep their iTunes database in XML by default.  Or, making even more sense, store the rating information in the MP3 files themselves using ID3 tags like everyone else.  I was lured into a false sense of security when I learned OS X was based on BSD Unix.  I thought maybe, just maybe, Apple would play nice with the rest of the world for a change.  Silly Trixter!

I’m not giving up yet.  I’m going to get my 14 months of song ratings back if it nearly kills me! Until then, I get to irritate my friends and family by posting blog entries from public computers while my email goes unread for, oh, going on 16 days now.

By this point I’m sure my friends and family are urging me to just forget trying to restore my old machine and just reinstall and start over.  I’m still working on restoration.  Why?

Because I spent over a year rating much of my 10,000 song library in itunes, and that information is not properly backed up.  I figure 2+ weeks of lost time is worth it to save 50+ weeks.

Where have I been lately?  Off the grid.  What originally started as a personal decision has now turned into a technical necessity:  The hard disks in my main machine have blown and we’re broke until I get paid next month.  I know I have other machines, but I’ve used this one machine for all of my main communication (email, IM, etc.) that it doesn’t feel “right” working on another machine for my day-to-day stuff.  Call me anal.

Next month’s payday is, conveniently, my birthday, so I will reward myself with two brand new hard drives.  Nothing fancy; I’ll probably do what I always do when buying hard drives:

1. Go to newegg.com
2. Look at every single hard drive with the specs I’m interested in; for example:
   • SATA or PATA
   • 3  year warranty at bare minimum
   • etc.
3. Divide the cost of the drive by # of gigabytes to get cost per gigabyte

…and pick the drive with the best value.

Why two drives?  Because I hate losing data due to circumstances beyond my control.  Must… mirror… data…

I realized today that I’ve been very lucky when it comes to technology and surprises. Previously I mentioned the surprise IBM 5153 I found in storage, but today I was able to count many more:

• An i-river iFP-380 128MB MP3 player. Shortly after purchasing it, some “beta” firmware surfaced on the official support website that turned the player into a USB storage device. This means you could copy music onto and off of the device without using the severely idiotic crippled software that came with it. To date, I think this is the only hardware player series they’ve produced that allows you to do this — all prior and later models require the software to enforce DRM.
• My ReplayTV 5040. It was a Christmas gift, but shortly after I got it, DVArchive was released, and allowed me to suck the shows off of the unit via ethernet via a sensible GUI. This greatly increased the personal value of the unit, as I like to archive shows that are important to me.
• In the early part of the new century, I purchased a 3ware Escalade 6400 RAID-5 controller, intending to put it into a Windows system to function purely as a file server. A few days after I purchased it, and before I opened the box, 3ware announced Linux kernel driver source for driving the card, and a GUI to manage the card remotely! Needless to say, I installed Linux on the machine (a P933) and it’s been running for nearly 7 years — and does much more than a typical file server would, thanks to Linux.
• In a similar nod to the PC/XT I found, I pulled an IBM PCjr out of storage and tested it — and found out it was much more than I realized it was. When running Flight Simulator side-by-side with said XT, it was running faster than the XT! Further investigation showed that it is probably the most souped-up PCjr I will run across: It has a Jr HotShot installed (brings the machine to 640KB without additional memory sidecars), the 8088 was replaced with an NEC V20 for an additional 50% speed boost, and the motherboard was rewired slightly with the Tandy 1000 graphics modification (allows Tandy 1000 programs to run without graphics corruption). Oh, and did I mention that the packing material used in the box was a complete PCjr Newsletter set?  Dang!
  

Anything like this ever happen to you? Technology goes from good to awesome as a complete surprise?

In the USA, Kingston supports cross-shipment.  So I already have my replacement RAM.  Two days later.

With a lifetime warranty and such speedy RMA/warranty service, I think they’ve earned my money for life.

In 25 years of personal computing, I have never once had RAM go bad on me. So when my Athlon box started to reboot randomly, I was initially at a loss to troubleshoot it. It was only after a few sobering minutes in memtest86 and switching sticks from slot to slot that I learned both of my KVR400X64C25/512 sticks were bad. No idea how they got that way; one was REALLY bad (half of it is trashed), and the other I probably could live with (only a few single-bit errors) but I filled out an RMA for both of them anyway. I don’t need my main desktop randomly flipping bits on me.

I learned two things from this experience:

• Lifetime warranties are good.
• With my Athlon out of commission for a week, it’s so… quiet in here.

Maybe I’ll finally get some console game-playing in.

Now that the MindCandy Volume 2 is finished, it’s time to archive the project and get all 550 gigabytes of it off of the video rig so that I can completely retrofit the rig with service pack 2, new drivers, the works. Compressed, it will fit onto about $20 of DVDs, so I decided to kill two birds with one stone and buy some 16x DVD-Rs and some 16x DVD+Rs to see which is faster.

The results are disappointing. They both suck, never coming anywhere near the rated burn speed until the very end of the disc (which is the last place you need speed).

Back when the DVD format wars were new, one of the major differences noted between the formats was that DVD+Rs burn at CLV (Constant Linear Velocity, where the disc slows down toward the outer edge so that data is burnt at the same speed “under the laser”), while DVD-Rs burn at CAV (Constant Angular Velocity, which means the disc spins at the same rate throughout the burn). CLV burns slower, but supposedly results in a higher quality burn. So you would think that DVD-R would spank DVD+R in terms of speed, right?

Wrong again. Burning 100 meg shy of a full disc, here are the numbers on my LITE-ON DVDRW SHW-160P6S PS0B:

• 16x DVD-R (Disc ID: RITEKF1): Average Write Rate: 15,208 KB/s (11.0x) – Maximum Write Rate: 21,779 KB/s (15.7x). Burn completed in 6m29s.
• 16x DVD+R (Disc ID: RICOHJPN-R03-04): Average Write Rate: 15,208 KB/s (11.0x) – Maximum Write Rate: 21,792 KB/s (15.7x). Burn completed in 6m20s.

They’re the same! Worse, the best you can do with a 16x drive feeding it 16x media is really 11x. At that rate, I’ll just keep buying 8x media; they cost less, but only take 80 seconds longer to burn.

So, what’s the point of 16x again?