Things were starting to come together for my trip back home. I wrapped up the final revision of the Smelterville book, got a haircut, the van got an oil change and new rear shocks, we went out to say goodbye to Grandsons Graham and Elliot, and I made a lot of progress pulling together a video this morning. I even worked in a well-deserved nap after all that activity.
Then, I looked down at the corner of my computer screen and saw an unusual scary-looking alert message. I think this email to Computer Geek Sons Matt and Adam will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about my travails. Bottom Line: I’m out of business until the Geeks parachute in.
HELP!!!
Got an alert this afternoon that my RAID 1 array had gone critical. That’s my boot drive.
I confirmed that my overnight backup had run and copied a few files I knew had changed over to the Drobo. Then I created an Acronis boot disk.
I loaded up the AMD RAID utility and confirmed that it WAS RAID 1 that was sick. My RAID 5 data drives were fine.
I went to Best Buy and picked up a new drive, just in case.
I told the utility to rebuild the mirror. It would crank awhile, then the computer would reboot.
I pulled what I thought was the drive attached to Port 2, which I thought was the bad drive, then I booted up the computer. It booted fine (much faster than usual, in fact).
There’s no joy in Steinhoffville
I went into the utility and confirmed that the drive in Port 2 was gone.
I put the new drive in, and got an error message telling me to tell it where it should boot from.
I tried Ctrl-F, Esc and F8 to get to a window that would let me do that, but no joy.
I pulled the new drive. Same result. I put the old drive back in. Same result.
I put the Acronis boot disk in the drive. It booted up with a bunch of data dumps and got me to a screen asking if I wanted to recover my computer. Rather than take a chance on screwing something up, I turned off the machine and typed this message.
Matt is getting up a 4 a.m. to ride 130 miles, so I don’t think he’s going to be of much help on Saturday. I’m getting ready to leave town, so I need to get fixed as quickly as possible. Am I overlooking something simple?
Remember the big Amazon button
Click on the big red Amazon button when you order stuff online. That helps me keep feeding hard drives into my computer and it doesn’t add anything to your cost.
Ken,
I hardly even know how to turn on a computer,but I know about grandchildren and these are adorable.
These are two of the most beautiful children I have ever seen! Sorry about you computer problems.
TMI! Just reboot your flux capacitor and everything will be okay! Lol
I have to agree the boys are adorable.
AS far as the computer I can offer no help. All I have to do is look at mine and it starts acting up. May I adopt Matt? I could sure use him at times.
Don and I have a rule of thumb that if he can’t solve my computer problems in 30 minutes without my breaking into tears of frustration, I call the Geek Squad. They are paid to fix my problems no matter how inadequate I am! LOL! If I had your adorable three grandchildren, I am not sure I would ever turn on my computer. They are all so darn cute!
Unfortunately this RAID doesn’t kill bugs dead; bugs kill the RAID.
Ken, you have 2 of the most adorable looking grandbabies! Do you rent them out to people that don’t have little ones any more??? You need to think about it cause I know you would make a lot of money … AND … with all that new found money you could buy yourself all sorts of new computer stuff!!! 🙂 Since I retired I don’t have an IP person to call up and say HELP! Now all I do is, swear a lot, cry a lot and then turn off my computer!! Thanks for sharing!
I hadn’t thought about renting out cuteness, but that’s a good idea. I’d better hurry, though, because cuteness leaks out at an early age, I think.
Kid Matt has my machine right now. He whipped it with a miracle stick, and claims that it’ll be good to go after all my data is restored from backups. (Unfortunately, the estimate of that happening was 1 Day and 14 hours. I have a LOT of data.)