Bloghorn

This really annoyed me, so I’m going to put this out there for anyone else frustrated that a hard drive they removed doesn’t show up in disk management anymore.

When a drive is removed from Windows Home Server, it’s re-labeled “REMOVED” instead of “DATA” and promptly ceases to exist in the disk manager. No matter what you do, the drive simply will not show up in the disk management again, even re-installing drivers and switching physical locations won’t work. The problem is that WHS automatically ignores all drives labeled “REMOVED”, assumes there’s something wrong with them, and won’t let you add them back in.

There is, however, a way to fix this. By mounting the drive in another computer and formatting the drive with another label, something other than “REMOVED”, the drive will once again show up in the WHS and be ready to be added back into the drive pool.

I hope that helps someone.

The Windows Home Server I’m running suddenly started acting funny a few days ago. Is started noticing it when certain video files would refuse to play. VLC spat back the same errors as if the file never existed.

So I RDC’d into the server and tried playing the files locally from the storage drives themselves, and it worked. It seemed like, for some reason, the server had re-filed the files in a different place, but forgot to update their location.

WHS uses “reparse points” to link the files on the various hard drives to one contiguous “virtual drive” that lists all the data. When a file is opened through the network, the server checks the reparse point and follows it to the location of the actual file. But when those points are corrupted, the files “disappear”.

Thanks to the WHS forums, i was pointed to the whsCleanup tool, that finds the bad reparse points, logs them, then deletes them as soon as you run a cmd file. The only problem was that the solution involved permanently deleting the affected files. Since the files themselves weren’t bad, just the reparse points, I followed the following steps to get everything back online:

1. Ran whsCleanup
2. Viewed the cmd file as text, made a note of every affected file
3. Went into the C:\fs\ folder and manually copied (not move, COPY) each file to be deleted into a new temp directory in D:\shares (the virtual drive)
4. Run the CMD file to delete the affected reparse points. Ignore the “error: drive not attached” errors.
5. Move (not copy) the files back into their original folders from D:\shares to D:\shares. Use the virtual drive for this leg of the process.

That took from thursday morning to last night to complete with about 3 TB of data. Thank God for SATA.

Windows Home server forum thread

whsCleanup

There are two weeks this semester that are conspiring to bring down my GPA, specifically the week Crysis: Warhead came out and the week FarCry2 will come out. Here’s my thoughts on the latest batch of games:

STALKER: Clear Sky

The last STALKER left me a bit confused as to whether there was any plot, and this version seems to follow suit. There seemed to be some sort of mysterious goings-on happening that threatened to end life as they knew it, but as the game progressed, the entirety of the plot boiled down to “go kill Strelok because he’s bad.” However, the implied plotlines involving the various factions and thir wars was pretty interesting, and the ability to lead a faction of my choice to victory was pretty fun.

But, as with the last STALKER, the gameplay wasn’t smooth. I remember one part in particular where, as soon as I walked out of a tunnel, an MG nest opened up on me and killed me almost instantly. Again, and again, and again. It took a good hour to go about 20 yards in the game. Other times, however, it seemed like I could just run though the level with a knife and come out unscathed.

But in general, despite the bugs and gameplay issues, the majority of the game was pretty awesome.

Crysis: Warhead

As awesome as Crysis was, Crysis: Warhead is even more awesome. Explosions are bigger, the guns look better, and the storyline is pretty good too. I have to admit, I had a lot more fun playing Warhead than the original Crysis, and I look forward to more of this kind of gameplay in the future.

Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway

Take a “long hallway” level from Call of Duty 1, add in some Rainbow Six combat style, the equivalent AI of Doom, a little of FEAR’s creepiness, add it all into a blender with the UT3 engine, and you’ve got the basic idea of how BiA:HH runs.

In a year jam-packed with “open-world” games, this game is just a throwback to the simpler times, when all you needed to design was the immediate surroundings. This becomes painfully obvious especially in the last level, where you’re running a tank through a “town”, which basically consists of a few houses placed between two long, unbreakable fences on either side, surrounded by green fields. Nothing in those fields, just the fields themselves.

And as if the AI didn’t make the game easy enough, the computer puts little circles above the enemy’s heads, intended to show how “suppressed” they are by your fire, but in reality, are used more often to find Nazis hiding behind walls, making the game insanely easier.

Not a “bad game” per se, but definitely not the shinig start of the year.

I just got back from the grateful Dead / Allman Brothers concert at Penn State. The BJC was packed to capacity with die-hard deadheads, hippies, Obama supporters and college students. Just wanted to post a couple pictures before sliding off to the shower (to get the smell of smoke out of my hair) and then to bed.

Before the concert

During the concert

The stage

I just wrapped up GM’ing a game of Paranoia! that I found online here, and it seems like the best scenario I’ve played yet. Everything works really well, and the entire team was red-faced with laughter by the end.

I edited it and put it in PDF form to make it a little easier to do locally, rather than from a blog. Here’s the PDF version. And may I suggest that one of the characters be allowed to find the eleventy-three billion little ball bearings in a crate somewhere? It comes in handy at the end.