Last night one of the two drives in my server machine died after a short (but violent) power outage (or surge). Since the drive was part of the RAID0 strip (two 40GB drives imitating one 80GB drive) all of my data was gone. I know, I know, I should have had an UPS or something similar.

More precisely, everything that I did not back up was gone. In the end, we lost a few e-mails of my wife and a single document (it was a final revision of a small manual, I still have a recent copy). I used the chance and when restoring important data (mostly source code history) I ditched the SQL Server 2005 Express + MSDE combo (long story) and went with SQL Server 2005 SP1 only.

That did turn into a world of pain, because Management Studio Express (MSE) did not allow me to change a few things because a text box was not filled in. It was not filled in because it was disabled by the MSE, so I struggled with it for a while until I found a workaround.

When you restore a database backed up from MSDE, users and their rights seem to be imported correctly. Unfortunately, the logins for the users do not exist and you can’t create them because you want the logins to map to the users restored from the backup, which you can’t do. The solution is to delete the users and create new logins and map them to newly created users with proper rights. That you can’t do because restored users got a fake schema to own, so you first have to delete the schema, delete the users, then create logins and associate with the new users (these will be automatically created for you). If it sounds confusing, that’s because it is

Besides from this, the rest was a breeze. A big thank you goes to NVidia for showing the other companies how the driver installation should look like – unified for all (recent) versions of the product. Just a few years ago I wasn’t even able to download a full driver version for my Audigy card (some genius decided that only driver updates should be available online, go figure) but today I was very pleased to find a unified driver for Windows XP that covers all variants of Audigy.

In the end, this was one of the easiest reinstalls ever, but it still took almost 5 hours.