I’ve recently pulled a drive out of Windows Server 2003 and tried to use it in Windows XP.

When connected, it shows up as “Healthy (GPT Protective Partition)”. I can’t assign a drive letter to it, format it or even repartition it.

Firstly, if this had data on it, you’ll need to go back to Windows 2003 or use a Linux Boot CD to extract it.

If all you’re trying to do is format it for use in Windows XP, read on….
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Microsoft IIS does not support RSS files by default. Here is a step by step guid eto enabling it.

If you’re impatient, already know your way around IIS and just want the MIME type details, they are:
Extension: .rss
MIME type: application/rss+xml

Otherwise, if you need more information, read on…..
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I just brought an 8GB Sandisk Cruzer USB stick. Unfortunately whenever you plug it in, it comes up as both an emulated CD-ROM drive and the removable disk. the emulated disk comes up as “U3 System” and it tries to run backup/sync software called U3 Launchpad.

Some people enjoy these extra “benefits”, but I’m not a big fan of the bundled software and just want 8GB of storage space I can call home.

If you want to remove the built in software and just use it as a memory stick, you’ll want to use the U3 LaunchPad Remover from Sandisks’ Website. The link to it is: http://www.sandisk.com/driverdownload/download.asp?driverId=2

I had to do some maintenance on my server over the weekend as one of the hard drives in the RAID array failed. It should have been a simple and straightforward task however it turned out to be the complete opposite.
Although only one of the drives had failed, I replaced both of them with newer, faster and larger capacity drives. I replaced them one at a time and synchronised the array in between each swap out.

Within 6 hours, the two drives were replaced and the server was technically ready to go, but the virtual disk was still the size of the older, smaller drives. No problem, I’ll just select the option to grow its capacity…. hmm, no option for that. No worries, I’ll add a second virtual disk which will use up the space capacity, hmm, nothing there either.

It turns out, as far as I (and google) could work out, there is no way to increase the capacity of the virtual disk.

I proceeded to spend the next 7-8 hours (until 5am Sunday) deleting the virtual disk, creating a new one and cloning the data across. First attempt at cloning the entire disk ended in failure as it must have deleted identification information telling the RAID controller that the disk was part of a RAID array. I decided the best option was to clone the individual partitions across. This also didn’t work.

I ended up spending the rest of Sunday morning reinstalling the operating system from scratch, just in the name of doing things properly and doubling the total storage capacity of the server.

I’m hoping these drives will continue running for another 3-4 years.

In the meantime, if you encounter any issues accessing this website, please contact me as I may have missed a setting somewhere.