Well, on a whim, I decided to give this a try on my desktop system that runs Vista Ultimate.  Since I don’t use Media Center except for testing on there, I didn’t figure it would hurt much.  By now, most everyone that is interested knows what it does and adds, so there’s not much more [...]

After continued problems with my old i8600, I was able to talk my wife into allowing me to put linux on it this weekend.  She only wanted to be able to go online, check email, print and probably get pictures off her camera - which I assured her were all things she could do with [...]

To the best of my knowledge, everything was recovered.  The last drive was missing one file and some metadata, but I was able to replace that rather easily.  Last night, I swapped out the drive with a bad block and completed my first parity rebuild.  It all went very smoothly and was over in less [...]

The second drive just finished its rebuild and it appears to be completely intact.  There’s really no way for me to know unless I go and start checking each movie, but I figure I’ll just find out as I go.  The folder structure was completely intact and all that was in lost+found were noname files [...]

Well, the port multiplier replacement came in and all installed just fine.  Good news is that it was the PMP that had failed.  Bad news is that when I got everything configured as it was before the failure, unRAID decided that those three drives were all new and started clearing them!
I hit the reset button [...]

Some of you may have been using Sam Saffron’s ruby script to scrape TheTVDB for TV show metadata, just to find out that it stopped working a few days ago.  TheTVDB has completely moved to a new API and the old ruby script no longer works.
If you’re in need of a new scraper, Bill Daugherty [...]

The port multiplier module in my newest external SATA enclosure failed this past weekend.  We went to put on an episode of CSI or something and there were no episodes listed.  After checking the other TV series folders, I saw that none of them had any files in them.  Logging into the unRAID web management [...]

Stopped in at Fry’s earlier and was able to grab that combo I mentioned a day or so ago.  It’s the ECS 945GCT-M/1333 motherboard and Celeron 430 for $49.99.  I can get the processor alone for $39.99 at MicroCenter, so that board is well worth $10.  I plan on replacing the crappy nForce board in [...]

Sometimes, there doesn’t need to be anything special to post about - like now.
I found that I won’t need a new cooler for my rebuilt quad system.  I ended up taking the board out of the case and rotating the heatsink 90° so that the fan was blowing upwards - out the 140mm exhaust mounted [...]

I finished my round of rotating boards this weekend when I replaced the P5B in my bedroom HTPC with my primary system’s DS3.  All in all, it was a pretty painless ordeal.
The Asus P5Q vanilla appears to be a terrific board.  Perfectly stable so far and provided exactly what I was looking for on the [...]