March has been a torrid month. Firstly, one of my hard drives gave up the ghost. Unfortunately it was part of the RAID 0 striped array which meant that everything vanished into the ether and the PC refused to boot.
Using a mix of brute force, sleight of hand, and excellent negotiating skills, I managed to acquire and fit a spare hard drive and loaded Windows back onto it so that I could attempt to get the RAID up and running and ideally recover the data. Three days later, while I was part-way through this task, there was an enormous bang when the power supply decided to part company with this world too. A few more favours were called in and I was able to fit a new PSU, along with some other useful stuff like a new CPU fan.
Another reinstallation of Windows followed which meant a few more days tweaking it to remove silly sounds when you browse, reload software and drivers, etc. But alas, it’s installed IE7 which meant that SWFs couldn’t be viewed thanks to Microsoft’s over-protective cross-domain security. So a few more days were wasted figuring out how to resolve this problem.
However, the upshot is that the PC is now flying along quite merrily. The downsides are the usual problems after this kind of trauma - lost emails/contacts, a host of useful tweak software vanished, loss of those really obscure but very handy favourites, documents and photos zapped and, most tragically of all, a few years worth of Flash files gone. I’ve managed to retrieve some of the smaller ones from the clone I made of the old drives but anything over the minimum sector size or which resided on the damaged disk is, in the words of Monty Python…passed on, is no more, has ceased to be!
