>Graff.

I’m finally back online.
let me just start with the fact that Virtual Machine 2007 started this… wait… maybe MixMan DM2 started this… yeah…

I’ve recently gotten a bit of DJ gear. Nothing special, a turntable, then a mixer with the phono on one side and MP3 player or MiniDisk player on the other, followed by a SB Audigy FAT4L1TY. I’m really craving a way to have samples within easy reach. I have the midi keyboard but that was a bit large for what I wanted – here comes sexy DM2 (for XP). Just assign a sound to each little block, and decky decky blip blip at will.

But oh no, it doesn’t work on VISTA – let alone VISTA64 – and I didn’t have my XP or XP64 because my RAID 0 (<--0 is VERY important to the story!!) wasn't working because of what I thought was a bad bios on my motherboard. I figured a virtual machine might be just the ticket - I'd just run XP32 on top of VISTA64! (spoiler alert - it was my power supply - suddenly insufficient with the addition of the new soundcard I got). Lo and behold upon installing VM I was 15Gig less in my HD, USB doesn't work for VM and I was in a world of hurt in my config. My system had a layer of virtual everywhere I looked. I couldn't uninstall it right, it retained the tendrils and my network cards were kablooi due to the extra layer. Countless hours of drivers, new drivers, wrong drivers, no drivers, anything to get it to work! Finally I put in an old PCI LAN card I had about… popped it in, popped in the cable, clicked the switch – baroooom, click. Huh? clicked the switch again – barom| click. ???? clicked the switch again and a nice ozone filled the air, pulled the plug, and lamented in the fact that my power supply had now gone kablooi. Fast forward to a week and a half later (extra half for shipment from Puerto Rico to CA, only to re-ship to me in MA. New power supply, and finally able to get my computer up and running – set up the bios – yeah, everything’s good. Put in the rest of the hardware and set up the RAID in BIOS – turned it on – BOOT DISK BLAH BLAH, INSERT SYSTEM DISK… and it did it in capitals just to smak me around. Oye, so I tried the 3rd non-complicated-RAID disk for VISTA 64 that I had been running in all this disillusioned BIOS time. It also failed to boot. OK – so it’s because I never had raid running in VISTA64? BSOD due to nvRAID driver? OK, I can understand that… disabled – same issue. DISKCRC.DLL even in safemode! GRAAA! Finally put in the VISTA DVD and booted from it to do a repair to the system.
Repair worked! I could boot to VISTA 64, but alas, even once booted I still had no RAID – oh it showed up as a drive – 320G of space but no partitions, no drives, and no luck. Windows Update had some nvidia chipset drivers – oooh, I’ll try those, nvidia raid, nvidia networking… all good stuff.

Rebooted, still no raid but I had networking. Put the computer to sleep.

Fast forward to today when I found a raid recovery program today at work – I was all ready to go… but no network?!! Try Try try… same issue I had before the whole system went kaput! ARG! FF>> 3 hours later and I’ve disabled nvidia onboard LAN ports (plural, 2 x gigabit) I inserted 1 x Intel PCI 100tx… and I’m online.

Never underextimate the replacement factor. I still think Vista is hoarked, I’m never getting the 15G back from the virtual machine reservation… looks like I’m in for a restore anyhow. Time to put the RAID to RAID 1 – mirroring, and buy 2 more drives for striping – where the very NONessential files will be kept. I’ve lost over 120 gig of music I’ve collected (maybe 110 is in other places – HDs, CDs, DVDs, etc) but mainly my purchased software, serials, and documents. I’m putting it all on my mac disk in the future. I’m sick of losing the stuff I pay to download. I want CDs dammit!

So now things are running (kinda) I can at least get back into the music. Nicole got me the expansion drive for my birthday so I can output to optical (which enables me to record to minidisk) and have some straight RCA ins. She also got me some real headphones, so I’m looking forward to letting loose on the deck when I’m not so hardware stressed.

So the lesson is RAID 1… RAID 0 is tempting, until you can’t even restore it because it’s a conglomerate mass of poo!