Pictured right is the screen I ran into on my system this morning after a couple of strange reboots and errors. "Odd", thought I. Since I’ve just gone through a case migration, so I ran through the usual checks – cable secured, proper port, etc.

Vista rolled through a consistency check, and "sorted" a bunch of files (which is never good), and we wound up here after the reboot. Well crap. This is just not good. What you’re seeing in that screenshot is the Intel RAID manager saying "I can’t see the volume anymore – you’re hosed."

This is a catastrophe. Well, sort-of.

I’m lucky in that I actually did a backup of my critical data prior to the case swap, and unlucky in that I now have to go through the gyrations of troubleshooting the disk problem and reinstalling the OS and Apps. I’ve been on 64bit Vista for a month or so now, and I haven’t done my usual job of creating an unattended, so if I go back to Vista, I have to do a full-on manual install.

I’m actually considering going back to XP, for a variety of reasons that I’ll get into in a later post. Suffice to say that I’m really not seeing enough of a compelling reason to stick with Vista. It’s just so…yawn.

As a side note, my first thought was "Oh my god – I’ve lost all of the 1000+ pictures I just scanned in". I then realized that I had uploaded all of them to flickr, which was a relief even after I remembered that I had a full backup of them on a local drive.

Further updates as events warrant.