…but you can’t fault my persistence. I have managed to break my main PC again. The exact same cause: once again, I decided to try putting my machine in standby after an update. And once again, when the machine came out of standby, it horrendously corrupted my ATI SATA RAID array (of Western Digital Raptor drives). Exactly the same steps, exactly the same results.
I have backups: somewhat out of date (by about 14 days), but backups none the less. You might say “but Kelly, you knew this had failed in the past, why weren’t your backups current?” Well, you see, my external hard drive where I keep my backups is full. I figured: what is the chance that this could fail catastrophically again? Of course, the obvious answer now is “100%”, but…well…okay, I’ll admit that was just a teensy bit dumb.
You might also say “But Kelly, doesn’t the old saying go ‘stupidity is defined by those who repeat the same actions over and over in the hope of a different result’?” No, no, I disagree. I changed things: it was arguably the same action, but a different set of initial conditions. I had installed the new Microsoft Vista performance and compatibility patches, which specifically said they corrected some problems with coming out of standby. Oh, sure, they didn’t mention *my* problem of catastrophic drive corruption, but then no one ever does. I’ve done dozens of hours of research on the Internet- I’ve found one or two people posting on the Asus motherboard forums who claim to have experienced the same problem (massive RAID array corruption after coming out of standby), but Asus is unresponsive to questions on the topic. So I keep hoping that some change from ATI, Microsoft, or Asus will fix the underlying problem without them admitting (or possibly even knowing) that it exists, and I’ll be able to document that solution here.
So…here I am, restoring my system from backup. Guess what happens part way through (“19 percent complete”) the process? Yep, you guessed it- a power failure. We haven’t had a power failure at our house in months. I think the demon of technology is laughing at me…
Isn’t Vista fun? I read an article where the Microsoft PR flack was discounting all the anecdotal reports of people having trouble with Vista and stores deciding to continue to carry XP machines for a while longer when they had planned on no longer selling them this fall. He said that their surveys of longer term Vista users indicate the vast majority of them like the system.
The thing is, the vast majority of longer term Vista users are guys like you that seem to enjoy breaking a perfectly good computer, not us dull late adopter types 😉
Anyway, don’t get so wrapped up that you forget you have to be at the airport to pick up yours truly!
Pick you up…ooooh, yeah, I gotta do that, too…
Hopefully I can get enough of my computer restored by 7:00 PM today that I won’t feel compelled to do any more later. Vista may or may not be at the heart of my woes- it could be a BIOS problem, or something wrong with the RAID drivers, or…who knows? One day I’ll either switch to a different storage configuration or some patch will “miraculously” correct the problem….
The real “blame” here rests on myself for persisting in the expectation that one day it will work 🙂
And maybe the world will implode and Kelly finds himself with a Mac… *smirk*
Macintoshes never have problems…oh no, never. For example, you will never ever encounter a situation where performing a simple upgrade of, say, iTunes, totally bricks your Macintosh due to a well known and repeatable bug.
Nope, that would never happen. Not at all. Nosir. 🙂