DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The second day of my Jaguar upgrade attempt ended much as day one — with an inaccessible mirrored RAID volume.

The driver is supposed to time out when a mirror isn’t available, and mount the one available partition. The bug is that this “waiting” condition never times out.

At the request of the software vendor, I booted the system after disconnecting one of the two RAID drives. I hate to muck with disk drives… but this seemed to be the only solution. I’ll summarize an afternoon’s work and a dozen email exchanges with the vendor, and simply say that although I was at one point able to mount one of the mirrors and copy off all my data, I was never able to correct the core problem. Throw in the usual mix of inexplicable SCSI weirdness (“Erm, it’s run that way for 4 years; why won’t it boot?”) and you’ll have a decent picture of the process.

So the good news is that my system is fully functional — I’ve installed most of the apps I need, configured the UI to my personal taste, and begun the tedious process of becoming accustomed to a new email client.

Monday I’ll revisit the RAID issue. Wish me luck.