I just realized that this blog turned two years old this month. Wow. I didn't know if it would continue this long. I know there were a couple of times when I thought my computing days were over. But here I am.

Yesterday, and old friend of mine called me from out of the blue, looking for help with a computer problem. He was putting a system together with a new motherboard, and spent a couple of frustrating days trying to figure out why he couldn't get his board to recognize a SATA RAID array he was attempting to configure. To make a long story short, in the end it came down to hardware documentation.

Don't we all love technical manuals!

This poor guy had spent two days trying to figure out why the board wouldn't recognize the SATA RAID. As it turns out, the particular board he had - a Giga-Byte GA-8I945P-G - did not support SATA RAID configurations. It only supported IDE RAID. However, the GA-8I945P-PRO board does support SATA RAID. Of course, the marketing copy leads you to believe that the -G board supports it, too - after all, it supports 4 SATA drives, plus RAID 0 & 1, so you kind of draw the immediate conclusion that you can configure RAID on SATA drives.

The documentation doesn't help much, because it is written to cover the features of both the -G series and the -PRO series boards. And there is a little marker that indicates that certain features are only available on the PRO board. The real work is stripping out all the content that applies only to the PRO board to determine what's left. It turns out the -G board has an ICH7 south bridge, and the -PRO board has an ICH7R. We arrived at the conclusion that the R in ICH7R stands for RAID support, which seemed to be confirmed by the block diagram of the board, which showed the SATA drives directly attached. The IDE RAID, on the other hand, was supported by a separate IT8212 RAID controller, located on the PCI bus on the other side of the south bridge.

Anyway, my friend thanked me for shedding some light on the situation and he will be returning the board to the place where he bought it in exchange for something else. Most likely, a different board entirely. He has a video editing card he wants to install, but it has a lot of limitations about what chip sets it supports. It indicates it does not work in a system with an ICH6 southbridge, so we are suspicious that it will not work with the ICH7, either. I'll be looking forward to updates from him to see how his configuration progresses.

In the meantime, I am pulling computers out of the trash. I'll talk a bit about that and show some pictures in my next entry...when I can dig up some time. My next major task is to upgrade my wife's computer. Although, she's thinking of just replacing it all together if she can find a good deal with all the software she needs, included. I'll certainly report on that as things transpire.

FYI - The UPS has saved my butt a few times now! What a life saver that thing is - I should have installed one years ago! Oh, and I had an issue at work the other day. Apparently, the operating system decided it was time to install some updates in the middle of the night, unattended, regardless of the fact that I had a bunch of applications open and three unsaved files. I guess it figured I didn't care, because when I came back the next morning, nothing was running. In fact, one of the major applications on the computer simply no longer worked, so I have to troubleshoot that next week. Computers hate me. Am I alone in this?