Josh the Aspie’s Blog

… but I’m not there yet.

I’m still working on the RAID array, unfortunately I have to do it in a rather indirect manner.

The hard drives are all SATA, and when setting up a RAID array in XP, that means several additional steps.

Even though I didn’t originally plan on having a floppy disk drive installed in my new computer, I had to put one in, in order to get the drives into the system. They have to go in in a 3.5″ 1.44 floppy, my software DVD won’t let me create a flash drive to pull them from, and I’m not sure that Windows would let me get the files from one anyway.

Following this, I had to actually get the files to the disk. This required a computer that has both a DVD drive and a Floppy, as well as having Windows or another OS already installed. The only one in the house that met these conditions was my younger brother’s computer, and it turns out it wasn’t virus protected. I’d rather not have my brand new computer infected by viruses from the first day I used it. And my little brother wasn’t interested in letting me get him up to date virus protection at that point.

After commenting on these facts to some friends over various IM clients, one of my local friends, Av of Deviant Paradigm, invited me over to let me use his system. While I was there he actually gave me a DVD RW drive he didn’t need any more for my old Gateway. The CD laser is burnt out on it, but it reads and burns DVDs just fine. My Gateway had a CD RW drive in it, so the two complement each other just fine. It’s a good thing I accepted his offer too, because for some reason the floppy we made at his place was corrupted, probably because the write protection slide wasn’t firmly set to the write enabled position.

My old computer also somehow got its display output settings set to one my new LCD monitor couldn’t handle, so I’ve got the computer set up down in the basement after installing the DVD drive, and have just finished formatting and re-writing the floppy. Here’s hoping this is all I’ll need to get the RAID set up.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 19th, 2007 at 1:19 am and is filed under Technology, Personal. 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.