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The backup saga continues. Perhaps I’m suffering from a virtual form of my IRL hoarding: data hoarding…
On the old, huge, Fractal-cased PC, it was time for some changes. Like in the HP AIO, I’m un-RAIDing the three drives in there to increase capacity.
First I made sure that any data on there was backed-up to the ‘Definitive’ external drive. I then accidentally deleted not only the stuff I had checked, but a whole copy of my personal generic data. This was a good lesson in why a back-up is necessary: accidentally deleting data has to be one of the most common causes of data loss…
Hoping the gone-data was still on the other PC (the other old desktop), I proceeded to restart and use CTRL-I to unRAID the three 1TB drives. Weirdly, after this, the computer failed to boot, despite the boot drive being an utterly separate 128GB SSD; it would just go into BIOS each time, like there was no boot device. I tried unplugging the three formerly-RAID drives, but no beans. Well, looks like we’re reinstalling Windows today too…
Actually, booting to BIOS was useful because it showed me that I’d not seated one of the RAM sticks properly.
In other news, this week I’ve tried to do a poor-person’s NAS by simply attaching a USB drive to the USB port on the internet router. It didn’t work, and it seems EE have disabled that functionality on their new “Smart” Hub “Plus”.
The next day I tried to set up Pi-Hole. This also didn’t work, again because EE have removed features from the hub, this time the DNS settings.
On top of that, they sent me an email saying the broadband bill was overdue; where the zark did my previous Direct Debit disappear to? Why didn’t they mention it wouldn’t carry over?
And don’t get me started on the incompetence demonstrated by the “engineer” who came over to install the fibre connection…
Unimpressed with EE at the moment.
UPDATE October 2025: just a theory after rereading these posts, but could the reason for the old desktop not booting be that I had more than one harddrive (crucially: three of them RAIDed to act as one drive) connected when installing Windows? This might have done that weird thing where the installation puts a random Windows partition on a drive other than the ‘main’ one (the one you’re intending to install on). Then, when I removed the RAID from the drives, that “important” partition went up the wazhoo, taking the ability to boot with it. Just a theory, that I have no evidence for, but you never know…
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