My last blog obviously went over a lot of people's heads, so I'll try and bring it in to laymen's terms:
A hard drive is a device in all computers that stores vital information: operating system (Windows or OS X), all your pictures, music, etc. Most people's computer's hard drive is setup to use the entire hard drive in one big chunk - I have mine broken down into 4 pieces so I can have multiple versions of Window installed in their own space and not screw with the other versions, and another piece allocated as a section that all the versions can access as needed. There is a little electronic map written at the beginning of the hard drive that tells the machine where each of these pieces starts and ends. Understand? Good.
Now, my computer has a special chip in it called a RAID controller. RAID is short for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. There are many different ways that RAID can operate, and I was trying to setup a fairly simple form of RAID called RAID 1, or disk mirroring. This is where you have two hard drives of identical capacity, and the system writes the data to both drives simultaneously. This allows me to have two identical copies of the drive, so if one drive goes bad, I have an immediate backup that I can switch to. A few years ago, I had a hard drive fail with lots of important work stuff and lost it all because our backup system didn't work correctly. It cost us a lot of money to have the data professionally retrieved. Now, by running RAID, I don't have that problem - in theory anyway.
About 3 months ago, I built all new computers for my company. I upgraded my hard drives from 160GB to 500GB. In the process, the motherboard I used failed and I had to replace it. I moved all my data from my old hard drive, but never got to mirror it on the new machine. I finally got time to do the mirroring, so I connected the second drive, turned on the RAID controller and it wiped out the map that I talked about earlier. Basically, without that map, it looks like there is no data on the drive. The data was still there, but I needed to find a way to rebuild the map.
After trying a bunch of commercial (read expensive) software and not getting the results I needed, I found some free software that worked perfectly. I've got a few new grey hairs, but I've got everything back that I needed.
A hard drive is a device in all computers that stores vital information: operating system (Windows or OS X), all your pictures, music, etc. Most people's computer's hard drive is setup to use the entire hard drive in one big chunk - I have mine broken down into 4 pieces so I can have multiple versions of Window installed in their own space and not screw with the other versions, and another piece allocated as a section that all the versions can access as needed. There is a little electronic map written at the beginning of the hard drive that tells the machine where each of these pieces starts and ends. Understand? Good.
Now, my computer has a special chip in it called a RAID controller. RAID is short for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. There are many different ways that RAID can operate, and I was trying to setup a fairly simple form of RAID called RAID 1, or disk mirroring. This is where you have two hard drives of identical capacity, and the system writes the data to both drives simultaneously. This allows me to have two identical copies of the drive, so if one drive goes bad, I have an immediate backup that I can switch to. A few years ago, I had a hard drive fail with lots of important work stuff and lost it all because our backup system didn't work correctly. It cost us a lot of money to have the data professionally retrieved. Now, by running RAID, I don't have that problem - in theory anyway.
About 3 months ago, I built all new computers for my company. I upgraded my hard drives from 160GB to 500GB. In the process, the motherboard I used failed and I had to replace it. I moved all my data from my old hard drive, but never got to mirror it on the new machine. I finally got time to do the mirroring, so I connected the second drive, turned on the RAID controller and it wiped out the map that I talked about earlier. Basically, without that map, it looks like there is no data on the drive. The data was still there, but I needed to find a way to rebuild the map.
After trying a bunch of commercial (read expensive) software and not getting the results I needed, I found some free software that worked perfectly. I've got a few new grey hairs, but I've got everything back that I needed.
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