It’s been while since I shared an update about my new computer. Frankly, it’s been awhile since I’ve done anything new with my new computer. I felt like setting aside this morning, though, to make some slight changes. A couple things were bothering me: one was that my audio card was exhibiting a hum. I wanted to move it farther away from my ATI video card, just to be on the safe side. The problem, I’d been told, about clear acrylic cases is that there is no EMI/RFI shielding, so I was wondering if I might be experiencing interference within the case more than from it. (Similarly, I can’t get Channel 2 to show up on my ATI’s TV feature.)I tried to move the sound card to a different PCI slot, but this also meant I needed to lower the Sound Blaster EX panel. I’d put it at the top of the tower, out of the way. Lowering it would provide some slack in its ribbon cable and audio wires, thus allowing the audio card to be lowered too.
After lowering the Audigy panel, I discovered I could not move the sound card after all. The IDE cables for my fourth hard drive and my CDRW drive were in the way, so the audio card was as low as it could get. I was at least able to straighten up a bit inside, vacuuming all the dust out; so it wasn’t a total loss.
I put the side panel back on, powered up the beast, and discovered one of my drives was not showing up. The second half of my SATA RAID was not being detected! I was striping the RAID, not mirroring it, so if the second drive didn’t show up the first drive was useless too. This meant I couldn’t get into Windows XP at all. I have no idea how this might’ve happened, since I did nothing with the hard drives. (And, yes, I did unplug the computer while I worked on it.)
I made sure the power connector and the ATA connector were secure. I even tried using the other (first) SATA drive’s cables on it. I even plugged the SATA drives into the others SATA sockets. There was no change.
No matter what combination I tried, the best I could get was only one drive showing up. At least I knew it wasn’t the cables. Those worked on the first drive at least. And it was the SATA socket, since that worked with the first drive. The second drive remained and remains undetected. And it looks like the problem resides in the drive itself.
Anyone know how to turn a SATA RAID into a single drive without losing data?
Fortunately my plain old IDE drive, my original drive, is still up and running. All the data — and at 300 GBs, I mean all the data — under Windows XP are inaccessible, but I’m able to at least get into my Windows 2000 drive.
And I can find out from my daily blog reads that Saddam Hussein has been captured!!!
Left: Don’t mind the dust. I hadn’t vacuumed yet. Right: The Hellmouth: the SATA sockets
