If I were a smart man... I'd stop using my Windows Home Server.

The PC I've built to act as my WHS is one monster of a frankenpc.

Inside it is an old Asus A7N8X Deluxe motherboard that was retired from normal use a few years back after it was no longer stable enough to run certain 3d games despite a great deal of driver work.

The CPU for some reason (when plugged into this board (despite large amounts of tweaking) insists on running at only 1.1 Ghz, despite being clocked by the factory for 2.2 Ghz.

The SATA controller was the cheapest I could find whose drivers I later found officially only support 2000 and XP and with some jury rigging seem to work in 2003/WHS.

Not the best combination... but it seems to work, mostly.

If I were a smart (and rich) man I'd buy some better supported hardware, or even an official Windows Home Server box.

This evening I my Home Server greeted me with this warning:

Believe it or not, this is something I've seen before and is usually the precursor to the drive extender blowing up on me and eventually leading to data loss.

As yet I've been unable to diagnose exactly why this happens or what piece of hardware or software (likely driver) is to blame.

That ends.

So much of what I've done with Windows Home Server has been about making tools that work well for me, that make it an even better product for me, and if other people have benefit of my add-ins, so much the better.

This latest volume error has lead me to sit down and start work on yet another tool, in the hopes of better diagnosing this kind of error. Not just informing the user that an issue exists, but helping them identify which disk drive, connected to which controller, something that is of vital importance to people like me with multiple identical drives:

Sure, the Console says one is failing, but IDiskInfo.Status doesn't.

If I were a smart man, I'd just quit working with Windows Home Server, quit writing code that hurts my hands, quit investing so much time and energy into itty bitty cases that Windows Home Server can encounter, cases that Microsoft didn't deem important enough (or have sufficient time) to include in a v1 product, things that while possible to do manually require a fair bit of behind the scenes work and knowledge, functionality that should be a single button in the Home Server Console.</rant>

... if I were a smart man.

Read the complete post at http://ihatelinux.blogspot.com/2007/11/if-i-were-smart-man.html