Elsewhere: Nazis!

My sense of impending doom has been going off fairly constantly for the last few weeks. Luckily, I know why, but this has made it a lot less useful than it was before. My sense of impending humor isn't working properly either, which irritates me a lot more.

In other news, I was able to painlessly reformat my 160GB external hard drive to vfat so that I could use it with Windows and OS X as well as Linux. The transfer times are a bit higher now, and copying over 100GBs of anime is a pain, but I think that it's worth it. Also, I can now easily reformat harddrives, which is always a plus.

The Story of the RAID Card

So, as it turns out, the thing which needs to be done to get Windows XP to recognize the RAID card is reflashing the RAID card's BIOS. Which, based on the instructions, is probably more likely to make the Motherboard think that it's a RAID card, but whatever. If it works, it will work, and if it doesn't work, I'll have to deal with installing Windows on a motherboard that thinks it is a RAID Card, and Windows will have to not only figure out how to run on that motherboard, but also how to address a RAID card which is attached to a motherboard which thinks that it is a RAID card.

Actually, that might be worse. Ah, well. At least this way this whole debacle might be done in a few days.

(And I'll be a bit closer to getting an Ultra-portable Laptop! Horray! Asus' Eee PC, in case you were wondering - not very fast, but very portable, and portability is what I want).

I Hate Technology

Or, more specifically, the Windows "Operating System" (it barely works. Why should it be called an operating system? Something like GNU/Linux is an operating system. Windows is a joke). Here's the story behind this:

I recently got the chance to build a really high-end system for some money. By high end, I mean a Core 2 Duo processor running at 2.66GHz, 2 Gigs of ECC RAM, a high-end GPU, and a 15K RPM hard drive. That's the part where it all started going wrong. To start with, the hard drive needed to run off of a SAS card (the motherboard only had SATA). Well, that's fine, it just added a week and an extra $200+ to the cost of the system.

At this point (yesterday) all of the hardware was working fine - the SAS card would recognize the hard drive, the RAM had its cool heatsinks, all of the other heatsinks on the motherboard were doing fine, and the entire thing was pretty quiet (it only has three fans in it - the CPU fan).

However, then I had to install Windows XP on it. Shouldn't be a problem, I thought. I mean, it will recognize the drivers, right? As it turns out, no. After ripping my computers Floppy drive out to hook up to it, Windows would load the drivers successfully, but would still complain that there were no hard drives in the system. Even though there is one there, the SAS Card's BIOS recognizes it, and it is working perfectly. Apparently, the drivers do not allow Windows to recognize the drive as a valid device to install to.

This is a very bad thing, as the 15K RPM hard drive is one of the best things about this system. It's also the thing which the person who this system is for was the most excited about - it literally would not work to downgrade to a lowly 7.2K RPM SATA drive at this point. Well, I suppose that we could, and just not tell him, but that wouldn't be very honest.

As it stands, I have three options: install Linux on the drive, run Windows in a virtual machine, and explain to the recipient that this is vastly more secure (he's really paranoid: the main thing this system is going to do is run a virus-scanner 24/7). I could also install Windows on a Flash drive, or another really small and fast hard drive, and mess around with the defaults to make all programs, etc. install to the 15K RPM hard drive (This would probably not work very well. A Flash drive would have a tendency to fail very, very quickly, and a SSD would cost far to much). I could also install windows on an old 10GB hard drive I have lieing around and image it over onto the 15K RPM drive (this would probably not work. Windows is picky like that).

So, basically, I hate Windows. As it is, the debacle of the hard drive has more than doubled the time I expected to invest in this project, and there is no obvious end in sight.

Of course, this entire thing is my fault: I should have just said that a 15K RPM hard drive is just not viable, and gone with a 7.2K SATA instead. In the future, I'm going to say that any requests about hard drives which does not relate to the size will not work (or, alternatively, make the customer install the OS - which would be more fun, but would probably result in a lot of irritated customers).