It's alive!

Last Friday I got the parts to fix the Win 7 box. Turns out I could have used a few other things, but I managed.

The new-to-me hard drive went in ok. and cloning the failing drive onto it went ok. After that I ran into a few problems.

The motherboard has 4 SATA ports and one PATA (IDE) port.

The SATA ports are arranged oddly and you can't really read the (poor) labeling on the motherboard. Since various things kept showing up wrong when I went into Windows (like trying to boot off of the D drive), I finally had to sit down and disconnect all but one drive, and boot with it attached to each of the ports in turn. That got me the port IDs.

[SATA 0]
[SATA 4] [SATA 1]
[SATA 5]

(SATA 2 & 3 are assigned to the IDE port)

There was a fair bit of futzing around after I got the drives hooked up the way I wanted. I hooked the Bluray drive to the SATA card I'd added. This later proved to be problematic.

Anyway, I had the drives hooked up like this:
SATA 0 300 gig boot drive
SATA 1 300 gig backup drive
SATA 4 2 tb drive that had been in an external case
SATA 5 (reserved for added another driove)

I'd have added that 4th HD except I discovered I was out of SATA cables. Turned out for the best though.

So I tried to set things up to restore from the backups I'd done when I realized the drive was failing.
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Yay for M-discs

I've just finished burning my first M-disc. It's a 100 gig BDXL.

It took an hour and a half to burn, and another hour for the burning software to verify the disk.

I'm now using Beyond Compare to compare it to the directory the files were burned for. when that completes, I can nuke them and the "original" copies on my far too full media server.

It'd be cheaper to use 2 50 gig M-discs or even 4 25 gig ones. but it's worth the extra money to have fewer discs to store.

At least with M-discs, I don't have to worry about the discs going bad from age, sunlight, or whatever. Just physical damage.

Gotta by more disks (of various sizes) to continue moving stuff off the sever (mostly old TV shows and some movies).

On this day

Riverside, Iowa
March 22, 2233
James Tiberius Kirk is born