Strange Doesn’t Even Begin…

Well, (I start a lot of sentences with that word) here I am with another tidbit for your consideration. Who, besides me, has ever heard of, “R.A.I.D.?” Well, if you’re lucky, you haven’t! I just finished one of the most aggravating weeks of my life because the Computer Gods were mad at me and they figured the worst thing they could do to me (besides kill me and that’s a no-no) was to introduce me to RAID. That is, a Redundant Array of Individual Disks.

This is where you can take several different disks that are on a network or, as was the case with me, in the same computer, and re-arrange them so they act as one hard drive disk.

When I first saw the RAID ad and saw what it could do, (it said speed up the pc and make everything better) I said to my self, (I do that a lot) “Self, you have to have that.” And, after all, it was an application that was on my PC when I bought it so it had to be all right.

OK, so I pushed a button and the little magic window came up and asked, “Are you sure you want to do that?”

You know, that should have told me something. But, since I already know everything, I paid little, if any, heed to it. I pushed the button (clicked on it) and the fun began.

Now, the reason I had two hard drives in my pc is so I can boot off one and use the other for storage and to back up, in the entirety, my primary disk so I won’t lose everything in case it crashes. Smart thinkin’, huh? Well, (that word again) ‘duh!’

Now comes the fun part. The installation took about two hours and it went so well that I was amazed. When it finished, It said, ‘Your PC is now the most wonderful PC in the Northern part of California,’ and that made me feel really swell! And it said, ‘You are really gonna love this: you know before this when you had two pesky hard disks to worry about?-Well now they are one!”

Whoa!! Back up some; whatta ya mean, ‘only one?’ I want two disks, not only one!

I must be not understanding exactly what this means.
So I double clicked on MY Computer and watched to see how many hard drives would be shown…WHOA!!!~ ONLY ONE DRIVE SHOWED!!~! What the hey?

Now I figured it was time to read the instructions for the RAID. OK. This was ‘striped’, -volume 0…0000! Boy, let’s reboot this baby and check the bios. I did that thing and, sure enough, there is only one hard disk. Bummer.

Well, (there it is again) after thinking it over very thoroughly and carefully for two minutes, I decided I had to un-do this RAID thing and get my other hard drive back. That shouldn’t be too hard. …Sure…

So I googled RAID and called them. The guy asked who I bought it from and I said I hadn’t bought it, it came with my PC. Then, says he, you need to call Gateway.

So, being a reasonable fellow, I called Gateway. After I finally got through (I had to pay for the call since Gateway has no 800 number for people in trouble) the girl came on and, after I explained what my problem was, she said the RAID application didn’t come on my PC. I assured her it did because I was looking at it. She said I need to call the maker of the app since she didn’t know anything about it. Well, Crapski! Where was my Dell when I needed it? Oh, yeah…mi espousa (a little Mex lingo there) has it.

To make a long story shorter, I googled it and tried seventeen things to undo it. None of them worked.

Then I accidentally stumbled onto a vague sentence somewhere (it could have been anywhere because by now I had been everywhere) that said,- sort of,- reboot, when the bios starts, click ctrl and 1 and bring up the ROM. Then delete the volume you want to delete and reinstall the OS.

I rebooted and held down ctrl and 1(one) seventy three times to no avail. Well, crap!

Now don’t give up on me. I’m a pretty savvy guy and have a knack for things. I asked myself, “Self, why, even though I am following instructions to a T, does this not work?” Well (“)then I have to try something else so I held down ctrl and I(eye) at the same time and, sure enough, it worked. Them damned I’s sure look like 1’s!

Anyhow, I had saved most of my stuff off onto Donna’s computer so I re-ran the OS and rebooted my PC only to find out there were no drivers on the restore disk; only the operating system so I called Gateway and they sent me a drivers disk and, here I am, back at it again, none the worse for wear. And I now have two hard drives, just what I wanted!

Later…