Technology Insights

Using RAID On Z68 Motherboard: Asus Z68 Extreme4 Gen3

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I recently got a new desktop computer that has a Asus Z68 Extreme4 Gen3 motherboard in it and wanted to configure RAID 0 on a couple terabyte hard drives to provide better performance and more space to my primary volume. Initially I didn’t see how to configure the RAID as I am used to an external hardware RAID card that has its own BIOS. After a little bit of poking I was able to locate the setting to enable RAID and then configuring it was fairly standard. Below I describe the setting to enable RAID on the Z69 Extreme4 Gen3 mobo and how to configure a new RAID 0 volume once RAID is enabled.

Technology Insights

DirecTV HR21: A Problem Has Been Detected In The Storage Device

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I was watching a television show late last night via my DirecTV account. The show I was watching has previously been recorded on my DVR and at the time two other shows were recording. When the show I was watching was over I attempted to delete it which it appeared to do but then it locked up one of the shows I was currently recording. Once locked up I was unable to use my DirecTV HD DVR HR21-700 remote to do anything. I waited for about 15 minutes to make sure it wasn’t recover since I had never had one of my DirecTV HD receivers do this before. After waiting that initial time period I decided to go ahead and reboot the receiver which I did by unplugging the power, waiting 15 seconds, and then watching it reboot through its normal cycle. The receiver appeared to be starting as it typically does until it got to the last two steps and after a couple seconds at the final step 1 of 2 the receiver got a blue screen with the message “A problem has been detected in the storage device” message as shown below.

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Verify a External USB Hard Drive On a CentOS Linux Computer

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Recently I had a hard drive crash that was in a Windows XP laptop. The drive would  not mount under Windows however I was able to eventually mount it under Linux and rescue some of the data. In this article I will describe how to verify the USB hard drive enclosure is seen on a CentOS Linux computer and verify that Linux is able to see the USB device and the drive.

First you will want to remove the hard drive from your Windows XP computer and physically mount it into the USB hard drive enclosure. This will involve connecting it inside (IDE or SATA) and then plugging the USB cable or cables into the CentOS server. Since the hard drive is damaged its hard to know if its not reading it or if you have something misconfigured, a loose cable, etc. Below are a couple tips to make sure that the hard drive is being recognized via the USB connection.