oops! sda was my raid.Forum: Other Help Topics Topic: oops! sda was my raid. started by: kEnder242 Posted by kEnder242 on Dec. 04 2006,23:03
I registered today to share a story with the DSL users. I'm a casual linux user, more of a hobby than anything else. Live cd's fill that niche very well. After booting the DSL-N cd on my main windows box I was looking forward to using that utility to install DSL on a usb key 'FOB' for an old laptop. It found the usb fob. I typed the default (sda) yes, yes, i'm sure I want to format it. Everything looked fine untill I put the key in my laptop, it was intact. Apparently I had forgotten that my 350Gig (nvidia SATA raid0 array) could also be a 'scsi' device. Windows XP booted to my primary PATA drive and just blanked out. Panic. An old install of WinXP64 on the same drive came up fine the first time (withou my raid visible), then 'froze' the same way the second time. Whew! Wait, Oh damn. I proceded to tear my box apart, look up partition recovery software, and prepare to back up whatever I could get at from the other drives. The damn thing (windows) wouldnt even boot with the raid removed. A distraction. Family stuff, I was away for about 10minutes, and came back with windows running. Added a swap file to the PATA drive, rebooted with no incedent. Plugged in the RAID drives, black screen again, but wait ... the distant rumble of a hard drive working hard. As far as I can see, windows and ntfs healed itself. This was very surprising considering my previous experience with microsoft, partitions, and cheap raid. The moral of this story: - never install your OS on RAID-0 - keep your important drives, files, production systems, etc seperate from any OS installation hobby. - give microsoft some credit (about 10 minutes worth) |