I’m such a moron sometimes. I got a new CPU this holiday, and I installed it yesterday. It was one of the last-gen AMD Phenom high-efficiency models. 4 cores and only 65 Watts TDP, and it was massively on sale. Those chips never go on sale. So I grabbed it while in the midst of my holiday shopping.
Once installed though, Windows basically ignored two of the cores. Drivers were put in for all four, but two of them remained 0% used. Things were technically working – it would boot, no problems running anything, but with two dead cores, it hardly seemed a productive upgrade. So I started poking about for answers. After much fidgeting about, I got the bright idea to clear my BIOS settings. It seemed a better choice than reinstalling my OS, which was where all the posts I’d read on the net seemed to be pointing me. Just one more thing to try before that though.
Boy was that a mistake. Doing that reset the BIOS settings on the built-in RAID controller, which caused the system to update the DMI data to one of my two disks, but it recognised it as a conventional IDE drive, independently. *FACEPALM*
As soon as it happened I’d realised my mistake, but it was too late. I hadn’t made a meaningful backup in over two years (this is the part about me being a moron). And now it’s all gone.
I had no choice. I had to rebuild a new stripeset and reinstall windows from scratch anyway, except this way was not by choice and with no backup. Two years of downloads and files and such all wiped. Fortunately, I learned a little bit from the last time this happened, back in 2003. I’ve been keeping most of my written stuff online, or copying it to other computers, but I’ve downloaded gigabytes upon gigabytes of PDF books and mp3 files since then, most of which were not backed up onto other systems.
It’s all due to my own damned laziness too. I have a perfectly good 500gb external backup device sitting right next to my system. It’s even plugged in. I just never turn it on. I also need to clean it up first because there wasn’t enough free space for me to make a backup. I just kept telling myself I wanted a home media server in my LAN closet with a nice safe RAID-1 array instead. I still do want that, and I think most of my issues would be solved if I moved to that kind of a setup, but I kept procrastinating. How many more crashes and accidental deletions must occur before I smarten up, pony up, and set one up?
This may be the worst ID10T error I’ve ever made.
Posted by Ron as Computers at 3:08 PM UTC