HP AIO: unRAIDing HDDs, sound-over-DisplayPort issues

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As part of the mahoosive project that is organising & rationalising all the data I've hoarded over the years, I have decided to un-RAID the two 465gb drives in the HP AIO. I made them into a single RAID drive for redundancy and perceived safety of data, but have since learnt that this is not the best way to back-up data. Sure, it's better than no back-up, but if the computer catches fire, all the data is still gone.

I'm going to try to be more disciplined with external hardrives, make a PiNAS (with absolutely no RAIDing; see above…) and have it backed-up off-site too.

So, after reïnstalling Windows 10 (it's deffo Pro this time) and backing up the data from the RAID, I restarted and pressed CTRL-I to enter the RAID utility, which is extremely simple to use. It warned about losing all data from the drives, which was fine, and I went ahead and separated them.

Back in windows, the drive was still showing up, and still had all the data on! Weird. Though one of the drives was ‘offline’. I deleted the volume from the online drive, and when I turned the second drive ‘online’ it appeared in File Mangler with all the data on! Good to know the system works.

Anyway, with their volumes deleted, I'm having a go at making a Stripped Volume. This will re-join the drives together, but in an utterly different way: they'll have their capacity added together to make one larger volume which will appear to Windows as a single drive. This’ll simplify storage. Hope it works!

The computer gave me some sound shit after the new windows went in, which I remember it doing before. I've got it connected to another monitor via DisplayPort, and then the speaker is connected to the jack in that monitor. Trouble is, sound drops for a fraction of second every so often, which is quite annoying. Someone on Reddit suggested increasing the sound quality, which sounded like bollocks, and didn't work. I went to Updates and clicked Optional Updates to update the drivers for a couple of likely-looking devices (Dell monitor & AMD audio). Seems ok for now, but we'll see.

First time kicking Microsoft Copilot out of my system & life... and reinstalling Windows 10

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The computer I have with the oldest installation of windows (i.e. the one it's been the longest since I've reïnstalled Windows on) is the HP AIO. It's a good machine, with some quirks, as all computers have, especially as they age.

This one, like all Windows machines, has suddenly decided it needs Microsoft's copilot on it, which is a waste of everyone's time, so I looked up how to disable copilot. It's fairly straightforward in Group policy editor, so I attempted to run gpedit.msc on the computer… and…

It's not on there. WTF?

This is weird, so I check what version of windows I've got: Windows 10 HOME??? How the fuck is it the Home edition? Surely, surely, Shirley I installed Pro on there, all those years ago. Right…?

Anyway, I tried a Reddit\majorgeeks workaround for getting gpedit to work on Home, but (predictably for me), it didn't work, so I guess it's about time to reïnstall Windows.

Just in case it all goes to shit and the Pro license key doesn't work any more, I thought I should image the current setup using Macrium Reflect.

At first I tried doing it onto a 500gb disk, but it turns out the 500gb system SSD is bigger than the 500gb HDD I'm trying to clone it to.

Next, tried a 1tb HDD: still fails; same weird error.

Tried the same 1tb HDD but used fdisk and diskpart to completely get rid of all partitions before commencing the clone: still failed. Macrium is dog shit.

I'll just image it for now and hope for the best.

A few hours later…

Shitting Macrium couldn't even manage that simple task; why do persist in using it…?

A little googling later led me to a Reddit post suggesting DiskGenius. Downloaded it, ran it, cloned the system disk to a slightly smaller HDD and it worked fine (despite spitting out an error at the end about the boot not working). Tried booting from it and I think it worked, but because it was an identical clone of the SSD, I'm not sure where I was running windows from. I'll try it again later.

Anyway, it was time to reïnstall Windows, so I booted from the old multiboot USB and went down the familiar road, until…

I did the usual thing of deleting all the partitions on the target disk, but when I clicked next to begin the installation, it gave me error 0x80300024. Never seen that before…

A little googling later led me to a golden Reddit post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/156rrmo/fix_for_0x80300024_for_windows_install_with/

I simply went into the BIOS and moved the target drive to be first in the boot order, booted back up with the USB and tried again. It worked! Amazing.