Jinxed it: Current RAID 1 woes

(tags hardware, computer, failure)

Looks like my Project Sugar got upset or jealous about my new PC explorations, because it corrupted my RAID 1 data drive. Yikes. I don't have a backup of my RAID 1 drive. How to backup at least 70 GiB of stuff? Get another HDD?

About a month ago, I got a new SATA HDD to replace a failing non-RAID data drive, initally via external USB 2.0, but starting last week, via internal SATA. I must have bumped something or whatever, because the RAID drive problem started then. First it was as if the motherboard didn't recognize the RAID 1 at boot. I figured out that BIOS couldn't recognize one of the drives, and/or finding the second drive as failed. Denial set in and tried a trick: I forceably deleted and re-added the registration of the RAID array, which seemed to work only if I didn't cold boot.

But I checked the Event Viewer's "System" Log and the RAID driver was failing with timeouts. Uh oh. I decided to do a ChkDisk but that revealed the corruption. I lost:

• My zsh shell history
• My iTunes Library metadata
• recent CDs I ripped
• other not so recent CDs that seemed to get the contents of the recent CDs
• my trust in software RAID controllers

I truly don't know how much has been corrupted. :( There's no log file a log file available in Event Viewer's Application Log "Winlogon" source (thanks pcstats forum) but it is incomplete (!), and all I have to work on is the modification dates and the re-syncing of archaic MP3s to the iPod that left my head scratching.

The biggest problem I think is my iTunes Library metadata. The binary file iTunes Library.itl was lost, and it was rebuilt from supposedly pristine iTunes Library.xml file. Unforunately that meant that every song in my 50GB library was imported with today's date. Ugh. And unfortunately the iTunes COM for Windows SDK doesn't seem to allow modifying the Date Added field. Perhaps if I (programatically) edit the XML file by changing the Date Added field and force a re-import... XML massaging, ugh.

I considered building another RAID 1 ... I would need a interface card (3970 yen) because I think its the SATA controller failing. Then I would want two 500 GiB HDD (1_3500 yen each). Then again I thought, "what are you going to do when that fails"?

I'm leaning more and more towards online services, and online storage (backup) is something I need to look into. At say 70 GiB, a service such as Amazon Simple Storage Service would cost me initially 20.00 USD the first month and 10.00 USD for storage. I could either try to figure out how to rotate and encrypt a backup out of this raw service, or try a registered backup client. My naive implementation would require a seperate disk for scratch space. Hm. Naive.