Generik's Tap: Computers and Internet

New Home Server is Done!

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 04:58:00 GMT

Well after some trial and error last night, followed by Internet surfing all over Microsoft.com today, finally figured out how Windows Home Server really works. Basically the way I wanted to set it up is not feasible, recommended, nor supported. But with that said, Windows Home Server actually may work better then I originally wanted. So the original idea had been to have roughly 900gb of storage that was redundantly mirrored using RAID 1. So as an example, I planned to put 2 750gb hard drives where all the data would be stored on one of them and then a RAID controller would mirror that data to the other. If one hard drive fails, the other picks right up and you don't lose a thing. Replace the bad drive and you are good to go once the surviving one has replicated itself to the new one. Well Windows Home Server doesn't roll like that. What Microsoft has done is create a hybrid software RAID called Driver Extender. Basically you setup Windows Home Server and it takes the first 20gb of a hard drive space and devotes that to the server operating system. The rest of the drive becomes a D drive and is turned into a data drive and there are folders setup by default to share music, pictures movies, etc. You can then start adding in additional hard drives and instead of them showing up as drive E or F, etc.. they get melded seemlessly into your D: (Data) drive. As long as you have more then one hard drive, you can turn on Folder Duplication and that will basically duplicate your data on 2 of the seperate hard drives. So if one fails, you replace it and never lose anything. Even better, if the hard drive that contains the OS fails, you pop it out and replace it. Boot up with the WHS disk and use the Rebuild Server option and when it is done you are back in business with minimal hassle. Hopefully I never have to see how that part works. ;-)

Ok so that's the technical mumbo jumbo and I expect most probably either didn't follow that or have already left. And that's cool. I am pretty geeked out over how this works now that I understand it. So after work today I came home and reconfigured how the system was put together. Removed the RAID arrays and set all the drives up as regular disks. Went into the WHS software and added them all into the storage pool and when it was all said and done, I had a server with a whopping 1.8TB of free space. That TB doesn't stand for Taco Bell either! So as I type this our pictures, or what is left of them, (Sorry Kato. can't resist) are already moved over as well as some of our personal documents. The massive music collection is slowly making it's way over now and should be done sometime in the middle of the night. Still have a few more things to tweak with the server, but so far it is coming along awesome.

New Home Server

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 14:28:42 GMT

I spent a good chunk of this past weekend working on the build of our new Home Server. The process involved dismantling my old gaming PC to re-use much of the hardware in it and then melding that together with some new hard drives into a new case. I bought a Cooler Master Cosmos 1000 case to house this all in as it was billed to be ultra silent and well suited to keep the system cool. I have to say this case is a thing of beauty. Brushed aluminium exterior with features built in all over and within it that are logical and convenient. The hardware installation portion of this server build was a treat and very painless. I had a buddy over to help out with things while he worked on his own server, and we made a day of it on Saturday. All in all no real snags put all the components together and getting the new server fired up for the first time. Of course it the whole day went like that, this would be a boring story.. and I can tell you it went downhill from there.

I guess I should mention some of the specifics of this server so it will be easier to relate to later on. I am using an older motherboard, which was top of the line for it's day and still holds it's own. It is an Asus P4C800-E Deluxe and it has a couple of built in RAID controllers to use. I was already running RAID in the PC I scavenged to do this, using two 160gb hard drives in a mirrored configuration. 160gb is not a lot of storage in the grand scheme of things so I decided for this server that I wanted to add two 750gb SATA drives and run those in a mirrored RAID array. It turns out that old motherboard will allow both of those RAID arrays to co-exist off of the same controller, so in my mind everything is a go. The idea was to install the Windows Home Server operating system to the 160gb array and then have the 750gb setup completely for storage of our data. Unfortunately the installation process would not accept the drivers for the RAID controller built in to the motherboard, and by extension of that, would not see the hard drives at all and eventually the whole process would blue screen. Annoying to say the least. Made more so by the fact that we knew what the problem was, but could not find the proper driver to install to fix it. So by the end of Saturday night I had thrown in the towel for the evening and was leaning towards breaking up the 160gb RAID array and just using one of those drives as a standard disk to install the OS.

The more I thought about that, the less I liked it. With those drives in a RAID array, the data is secured against a hardware failure and that is what I really wanted to see with this build. So Sunday morning I decided I would install a 5th hard drive into the system, a 40gb drive that had been in the old PC. I started the OS installation and about 5 minutes later I get a message that it requires a hard drive with at least 65gb of space and will not move on until that drive is replaced. Stymied again. So to finally get this working, I went ahead and purchased a new hard drive yesterday and swapped in a brand new 160gb disk to use for the OS. And guess what.. The server is now up and running. It still needs a lot of configuration and tweaking, but the OS is installed and running and last night it should have performed an initial backup of one of my PCs. I am starting to move over data to it as of last night, starting with our music collection. Tonight I should be able to get our picture collection (what's left of it :-P) moved over and have that all set to be shared to the other PCs in the house. I still have a lot to learn to make sure I get the most out of this setup, but it so far has been a fun process.

Fun with restore software

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 02:01:34 GMT

In an attempt to recover the wrongly deleted photos, I am now trying out the 3rd or maybe 4th application that claims to specialize in this task. The biggest hassle in this process is the photos resided on what is known as a dynamic disk. Basically I took 3 physical hard drives and using an option within Windows Server 2003, made them act as 1 large disk. When you save to this dynamic disk, it can basically wind up on any of the 3 individual drives, and even potentially be split amongst more then one. So as you can probably imagine at this point, it gets a little tricky to get that file back. The problem is many of the data recovery applications out there don't really support recovery from this type of setup.

With all that said though, I have had some almost successes with what I have tried so far. The first application was a total failure. It only recognized the disks individually, so I started guessing which disk it may be on and scanning for deleted files. First try I get results of stuff I deleted months to even a year or more ago, but no sign of the My Pictures folder. Wrong disk. Next try the scan process took about 2 1/2 hours to complete, and either right when it finished or just before it, the application would crash and close. I tried twice and gave up on that one.

Second application recognized my dynamic disk and it scanned it very fast. Took maybe 2 minutes total to scan and there is the My Pictures folder. And in the folder is all our missing photos! Overjoyed I hooked up a 500gb external hard drive and told the application to restore the entire My Pictures folder to it. Process starts copying data and after some time it is done. Unfortunately when I went in to that external hard drive, what should have been a 5gb folder of photos was only about 300mb and basically every single photo was unviewable. Even the photos that are currently just fine. So thinking I must have missed an option I start trying various ways of having that software recover files. All with the same results. Not really sure what the problem is, but all in all, I am encouraged to see my data is potentially still recoverable.

So now I am sitting here trying a 3rd application which is scanning the hard drive as I type this. This one apparently does a more sophisticated scan as it has now been 20 minutes or so since I started it and it is only about 25% done. Crossing my fingers that maybe the 3rd times the charm. But if not, I have one more application that I just downloaded. This one actually looks like it may be the nicest one yet. Time will tell though, and if things go well, I will never even know how that last one works.

Excitement with Computers

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 18:51:42 GMT

This has been an up and down week for me in terms of home computing. I have been planning on building a server at home using Windows Home Server as the OS. So last week I started putting a parts list together to meld with an existing PC I have that I am going to beef up for this project. The idea is to create a centralized location for all of the family photos, videos and our digital music collection. Windows Home Server will also perform backup processes on every PC connected to the home network and will easily share all of our multimedia files out to my Xbox 360. So early on this week I started seeing some errors popping up on the PC that currently houses all of this stuff right now. That upped the timetable for me to get things ordered and make this new server a reality, and on Tuesday I placed an order.

Tuesday evening Kato comes down to the basement and tells me to pause the game I was playing, and then informs me that all of our wedding photos are gone from the network. Hmm.. that's not good. So I go investigate, and sure enough there are a mess of now empty folders in our My Pictures folder. At this point I am totally befuddled as to what could have caused this. I initially thought maybe the errors I was starting to see had finally reared up and caused a tangible problem. But hard drive errors don't work like this. I would be getting errors trying to open folders, not just see data missing. And the only area that was affected was the My Pictures folder.. On top of that, folders that had videos in them, still had videos even if all the photos were now gone. So then I start thinking maybe some kind of virus that was singling out photos. But that didn't really fit either.. this PC is setup as a server and it only got on the Internet to go to Windows Update or to download drivers from reputable sites. So little chance for it to pick something up on it. The other oddity is all the affected folders had a 'last modified' date of 1/08/2008 indicating to me that whatever had happened occurred then. So with a sick feeling that the photos were all gone..I went to bed perplexed and annoyed. And in the morning the answer hit me on the way to work.

We both received Zune MP3 players for Christmas from Kato's parents and they have the ability to synchronize music, video and pictures from your PC. I recalled that early the week before Kato finally got hers out and was setting it up with some music and wanted to put some family photos on it. I also recalled that at one point I had walked in to see how it was going for her and she was linking to the entire photo album. Well the way the Zune software is setup is screwy, and until you are pretty intimate with how it works it is easy to do the wrong thing at the wrong time. Kato didn't want every photo, and started deleting what she didn't want thinking she was removing it from the Zune. Instead it was right off the PC. Shit happens and it could be a lot worse. The truly important photos we still have, and there is a chance that some data recovery tools will allow me to 'undelete' the files. Worst case we lost a few hundred photos that were digital only. I figure there are people that lose all of their possessions in a house fire or other natural disaster and when I put it into proper perspective it's hard to really worry too much about it. If anything, it is a good learning tool for me on making sure things are more secured in the future. It's just annoying that if this had happened 2 weeks later, all of that stuff would have been properly backed up.

Which speaking of that... today is the day all the new computer parts is due to arrive. So over the course of the next few days I will put together the new server. The next plan is to re-install Windows on my main PC and get it running at optimal conditions and then get it setup on a proper backup schedule with the new server. Then, if Kato wants, I will do the same for her laptop. Basically the idea is to give all the PCs in the house a fresh start here in the next few weeks. Should be a pretty neat setup when it is all finished.

Is the HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray war over?

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 20:45:56 GMT

I don't have a horse in this race yet, and don't intend to until the dust settles. But it looks like that may be coming pretty soon. This week Warner Bros. declared full support for the Blu-Ray format and will exclusively support it. With that detail coming to light, Paramount, a current supporter of HD-DVD, unveiled that they had an escape clause built into their contract with HD-DVD to switch to Blu-Ray support if Warner Bros. went that direction. Currently they are saying they still back HD-DVD, but to me the writing is definitely on the wall. Blu-Ray is now officially supported by 20th Century Fox, MGM, Walt Disney, Sony and now Warner Bros. HD-DVD is supported by Paramount and Universal. If that news isn't bad enough for HD-DVD, Microsoft announced that they are not ruling out the possibility of a Blu-Ray add-on player for the Xbox 360. For those that don't know, Microsoft is one of the chief backers of HD-DVD technology and I would say this concession is clearly the start of the end to the format war. Personally I was somewhat hoping for HD-DVD to pull through based on it being a cheaper technology then Blu-Ray. But in the end, I have no money invested in either format so it really doesn't make too much of a difference to me.