I’m more or less back to square one. Or, rather, 1.5.

I’ll tell you, I was a lot more sternly judicious in what I installed this time. Because my sample storage was intact, I was able to save myself a lot of time re-installing libraries like BFD and SampleTank. Even still, it was fuckin’ tedious. And there were a lot of recent updates that I didn’t have burned to backup so tracking/downloading files and registrations, logging on the various websites, only adds to the chore.

Here are some thoughts/observations on DAW-oriented pre-crash recovery. This is may be real 101 stuff but they’re lessons I’ve learned.

• Know you’re sequencers’ default audio storage location. Even if you immediately change it, or have been working from the same per project directory structure for years, make sure you check it during backups periodically. I know that mine had accumulated a fair degree of crap over the years for various reasons. I corrected it when I came across it but never really addressed the WCS. So I’m not sure how deep the damage, and hopefully it will be mostly on projects long ago abandoned, but nevertheless…
• Futher this: When working with plugins, particularly softsynths, and you’re shutting a project down for the night, it’s a good idea freeze/render/bounce/whatever before closing out. If it’s a complex multi-out instrument you could just bounce to a temp track, just so you have guide. I’ve had this nip at me occasionally just as it is, you load up some synths and it has suddenly detuned itself or reset all its parameters. But when you start changing plugin addresses it’s a really recipe for things breaking.
• Maintaining a simple text file of all your registrations and address information will only get you so if you’re audio rig isn’t connected to the internet. A thumb drive is essential. Nevertheless it’s still cumbersome.
• Some companies need to take a good look at their web-based registration strategies¹. And thank you to those companies who make it easy.²
• Keep your drive image software up to date. Otherwise it’s just useless.
• Do not attempt to “slipstream” your install unless you really know what you’re doing.
• Simplifying is not over-rated.

I also misplaced my Sonar 2 CD case serial number (perhaps temporarily; I might be able to dig it out yet, there’s some boxes in the closet…). So I don’t have the Timeworks EQ and Compressor at the moment. While I certainly have a lot of things that can replace ‘em ably, I used them a lot for many of years.

So, yeah, a lot of this is due to my glacial working pace. And my stubborn refusal to hook my audio computer up to the internet teat.

So, I’m looking at my hard drive crash as my computers way of telling me it was not happy, and I needed to streamline my process. I plan to get a good disc imaging program and make a good clean go of it.

^{1Spectronics comes quickly to mind while I wait to hear back from support on just how to re-authorize StylusRMX. But there a couple others whom I won’t slag off here.}

^{2Anybody who generates their serial number from a unique user name or user account – Melodyne (particularly sophisticated), SonicCharge, AudioDamage – and while NI I believe is machine based they’ve pretty much nailed the engineering of the activation control (YMMV).}

^{Photo courtesy of Jim Hankey. (See comments.)}

Well…

A new hard drive and a copy of MS WindowsXP Professional later, the computer is back up. And it seems my SATA samples & audio drives are intact. XP Pro recognized them with out the brief struggle I went through on my old polluted XP Home installation. So good news.

But getting here was not easy. My legally obtained copy of XP Home Upgrade was useless to me since I had somewhere along the line lost/discarded my WinME installation disc. (Don’t laugh. That OS worked way better for me than 98 ever did. Okay, laugh a little.) I had an old version of Ghost and a DVD image of a previous OS re-install – and I struggled for a day trying to make it work with floppy drives and boot-disks, half-remembered DOS commands and old 8-bit programs, the works, all bringing up memories of long past IT work. But nothing worked and I don’t have the time.

I thought briefly about Vista. But then I thought better. Really, I have nothing against Vista – it’s on the very laptop on which I’m typing. It’s a fine OS for internet and 2D graphics and web coding. But it wants to be connected to the internet and I’m just not prepared to go down that road with my music rig. I’m fine with never having to worry about network drivers and firewalls and such. Not connecting my DAW to the internet does bring up some interesting issues regarding the OS and driver updates however. (And I get to speak to someone on the Microsoft payroll when I activate it over the phone. Always less painful than I think it’s going to be.)

So I have to decide whether it’s worth it to install one of the gray-market post-SP2 update packagesor not. I mean, looking through this list there’s a lot of crap I could not care less about; and then there’s a few things like this: A non-paged pool memory leak occurs when you capture specific MIDI SYSEx messages in Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 Yikes.

So, while mucking about in the guts of my music computer, of course I got to thinking about just chucking my motherboard & CPU (ASUS & AMD 64 3200+ respectively) and just go dual processor already. I mean, I’m already having to rebuild my work environment from the ground up. And my motherboard is not communicating well with my processor fan so it won’t boot without telling me there’s a fan error or if I monitor the fan with some utility it reports the fan as turning on and off, which it clearly is not and the temp never goes above 46/47. (I’ve been ignoring it for the year or so that I’ve been running it.) So it’s kind of a crap motherboard. And I’m sure I would notice the speed and power.

So why not? Well, it would behoove me not to spend the money. I’d have to chuck in for some new RAM, probably go back down to 1gig for a while; it would probably all come to about $300 give or take $20. Moreover, I’ve been working fine for a couple of years with the same relative amount of power and getting along just fine. I’m really trying (I swear) to stick to “If I can’t afford it I don’t need, and even if I can I probably still don’t.” Why not hold out another year, or until something breaks, and get a real posh setup?

Anyway, let the driver & software installation begin.

^{The Gates cheesecake photo is via the Coding Horror blog and it’s a pretty interesting read. I recommend it.}

After six years, 2 different hardware configurations, and countless upgrades and installs, my primary hard drive seems to have shit the bed.

I guess the last-ditch software/plugin purge wasn’t enough to rescue a hard drive that is two years too slow for what I ask of it. I knew was going down eventually. Fortunately, I just went through an extensive backup. All my samples and projects each have their own dedicated drives and from the looks of things they’re intact. So unless things have gone far more wrong than I believe, I could just be a matter of reinstalling everything, which in some cases is huge pain in the ass.

So it could be worse. But I really wish I had the scratch to just buy a whole new system.