Shoot Me Now!

It has been a bad week for things breaking. I found out my Nikon 70-200AFS f/2.8 lens, which stopped focusing, was not going to be repaired under warranty ($600 plus tax); the air conditioner stopped working a week after getting repaired; something got stuck in the central vacuum pipes in the wall and it lost suction; and, my photo edit suite workstation died.

Despite feeling the weight of an old Vista install, the edit suite had been running fairly well after I solved an intermittent reboot problem about a year ago. Then my wife reported a reboot while she was working the other day. I did not think too much of it until I saw it stuck on the RAID controller BIOS page the following day; one of my striped arrays had a drive with the word "ERROR" next to it. As it happened it was the OS drive, so I was completely dead.

After playing with the computer for a while it seemed clear the error was not a one off situation, so I went looking for the Western Digital drive diagnostics (for my Raptor drives) to be sure what was working and what was not. I needed a DOS bootable USB stick to run the thing, which turned out to be an annoying problem to create from my other Vista computer. I eventually got it sorted out and determined that one drive was dead (time to see how the 5 year WD warranty works) and the others were fine.

I decided a quick fix would be to simply loose the broken RAID array and go with a mono drive for the time being. I went to grab my Vista install disk only to be reminded that I had originally purchased a 32 bit OEM disk and downloaded the 64 bit version, which I then installed. Not only could I not find the backup DVD I created for the downloaded version, but I could not find anywhere at Microsoft where I could download (no MSDN subscription) a new copy. Since I was having to go through the pain of a clean install anyway, I thought I would say goodbye to Vista and hello to Windows 7. Off to buy a new license.

Up to this point, my elapsed time on this whole project till now is about 3 days. Mostly because I have had other things to do, but there has also been a fair bit of time sitting in front of a screen waiting and or scratching my head. I was pretty happy when I could finally say I had all my ducks in a row and could begin my clean Windows 7 install. After a fairly quick book from the install DVD, I was surprised to find that it seemed to know all about my Intel(R) Matrix Storage Manager RAID controller as all my drives appeared on the install menu. I saved finding and loading the drivers. My pleased look soon wiped away as a new problem seemed to be forming.

Two of the four partitions displayed had a note that said they were not compatible with being a Windows system drive. This was okay as this note was not present on the one I really wanted to use. However, when I tried to go to the next install step I got an error: Setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition. It seemed simple enough at first until I realized that no deleting, formatting, or creating new partition from the menu would help me.

A quick search on Google demonstrated that I was not alone, but nothing suggested seemed to help. I thought there may have been an issue left over from the RAID controller. I used the WD diags to clear the drive. SHIFT-F10 brought me to a command line where I could use DISKPART to try and clean things up, but no help there either. There were recommendations to disconnect all other drives, but that did not seem to help. I installed a drive I had not been using thinking there may still be some residual RAID "effect", but no.

Many hours and many more reboots had passed. I was just about to dump the SATA ports on my ASUS motherboard and find an old IDE drive to try when I thought I would give Google one more shot. I dug a little deeper through the search this time and found more of the same stuff, but one very short post solved my problem. It repeated an old refrain, "unplug all your other drives", with one minor difference. In parenthesis it said "external" and "flash". I looked down and saw that my USB stick was still installed from days before when I was still testing the failed drive. I pulled it out, clicked NEXT and nearly fell off my chair when the Windows 7 install continued! I guess a drive is a drive is a drive. (I did not need to unplug the DVD drive with the install DVD in it though, so maybe all drives are not truly equal). Doh!

As a side note, I found a great piece of software during this ordeal. TestDisk is used to repair problem drive partitions among other things. I had to break a RAID 0 array in the course of things and TestDisk repaired it perfectly. I would tell you about how I solved the making-a-bootable-DOS-USB-stick-under-Vista problem, but it was more fluke than process and I had no energy to go back and recreate it, so I will be labeling and keeping my DOS stick intact.