A quick tip for those who might be moving from a mobo-enabled hardware RAID approach to a software RAID approach as enabled by Windows 7.  The particular use case I’ll describe here is for RAID 1 (Mirroring).  A typical scenario could be:

1. You’ve got a mobo that has a hardware feature for enabling SATA (or other) RAID.  You had decided to use RAID Level 1 (mirroring) to enable redundancy of data across disks using this mobo-based embedded RAID.  You believed that this would provide to you the ability to recover quickly in the event of a single disk loss.  Note: RAID 1 is NOT a backup solution.
2. You’ve had a RAID warning on one of the disks.  You reboot and discover that the assigned array drive doesn’t contain all of your recent work.  This could be because of the hardware vendor’s implementation of write behavior, caching, etc. You disable RAID completely in the BIOS (or via driver configuration), and enable the other drive (mount it online) as your former RAID volume letter, and discover your data is there.  Maybe it was just a mobo driver problem?  Likely.  I’ve wrestled with mobo-enabled RAID solutions for years now only to finally realize they just don’t work as advertised.  If you need real hardware RAID, go to Adaptec.
3. In a sigh of relief upon booting your computer and seeing your data, you decide that you should now really understand how to recover the mirror in the event of various types of failures, and start researching what really can happen when an embedded mobo RAID solution blows up.  You essentially discover you have to have a replacement mobo and drivers handy.
4. Realizing this might not be realistic, you remember that Windows has software RAID features.  You start researching, and find out that in the event of a mobo failure, you can (in theory) take your Windows software RAID drives to a replaced machine.  You also learn that software RAID has improved significantly recently and you may only suffer a very small penalty on write operations, which are a minority of the operations for most non-server applications.
5. You fire up Windows (in my case, Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit), and launch Disk Management.  What next?

At this point, assuming there aren’t actually any hardware issues with your drives, you can ensure that your good drive is mounted as your former RAID volume letter.  Take the second drive and wipe it, but only if you have backups of your data!

Now, you go to mirror the second drive with the first (that has your data).  How to do this?  In Disk Management, you right-click on the drive (in the right-hand space representation) of the drive that has your data, and click ‘Add Mirror’, like so:

Except, you discover, as is highlighted above, that Add Mirror is greyed out, and disabled.  What gives!?

The solution was not trivial, but worked for me:

• You must ensure that your secondary drive, the one you’ll be creating a mirror of your first drive with, is ‘Unallocated’ (Delete Volume).
• If that doesn’t work, then perform a ‘Shrink Volume’ command on the drive that contains your data.  Choose a very small shrink amount, such as 512MB.  You should have much more than this free.  This operation may take awhile.  Go grab a beer – or a scotch, or three.
• When that operation is complete, you’ll be left with 512MB of unallocated space.  This of course is simply annoying, I want to be able to use all the space I have!  So…
• Now perform an ‘Extend Volume’ command on the drive that contains your data.  Extend it by the maximum allowable amount.

Voilà!  Now right-clicking the drive that has your data on it reveals the ‘Add Mirror’ command to be enabled for you to extend your existing drive onto the second drive, as a RAID 1 Mirror.  This will invoke a resynchronization, which will take some time.  Grab more beer/scotch, or go to bed and let the drives synch overnight.

Please, one caveat: YMMV on this.  There are simply too many different drive combinations, OS versions, etc. for me to comment on all of them.  However, this worked out nicely for me, I hope this helps someone! 

Happy New Year 2011!

After arguing with an Adobe person earlier this year about, among other things, the proprietary nature of ActionScript given the re-invigoration of the last few years of interest in the ECMAScript standard, I was sure to get my plug in for a 64-bit version of the popular Flash player browser ‘plugin’ !  I’m quite certain they weren’t listening to me, but I was happy to recently discover the preview here.  Works well for me, even though it is a preview version.

I can’t help but wonder what took so long?  Then, I happened to catch this today (though its been posted for a bit).  Maybe an acquisition by the maker of the world’s most popular browser was the impetus!

Update: The SUCK doesn’t stop on this one: Silverlight doesn’t, repeat DOES NOT run in IE 64!    See:

Update 2: Double SUCK!  Apparently my original link to the Adobe labs download for the 64-bit Flash plugin no longer works (as of 1/1/2011).  Maybe they’ve taken it down!  Ugh.  Well, I’ve got it installed anyway:

Hello, all, and welcome to my new blog.  I'm really stoked about finally firing up a blog...

So, who am I?  I'd best describe myself as a combination software developer, architect, and technology leader/manager.  Perhaps I haven't really decided what I want to be when I grow up!?  

Really, I'm passionate about technology and enjoy all three of the primary roles I play.  I find that most of what I have done and most of what I do regularly is to develop good software with a passion (typically using .NET and other Microsoft-related technologies), design and architect good solutions, and lead others in technology endeavors.  And on some days it is all of the above! 

To that end, I would like to share my experiences, musings, and knowledge with others.  While I'll likely write about a variety of technology topics as often as I can, there will likely be two recurring themes I hope to address often:

• I wish to in general help elevate the knowledge of those developers (.NET, in particular) who have not for whatever reason embraced good design and architecture principles.
   
• I hope to reach out to all of those technology leaders who for some reason or another have either lost the passion for effective solution development or perhaps never really made the appropriate connection(s) with their developers or customers to enjoy the wonderful experience that is to be had from delivering cool, well-designed, and working (that's important) solutions on time and under budget.

Of course, I'll likely throw in some topics on life as a technologist and maybe even life in general, too.

I hope you find reading this blog worthwhile, and again, welcome.

Sincerely,
Erik