You could make spaghetti in my blood right now...

In other words, my blood is boiling.

You see, on the machine in my office, my adviser wanted me to get two hard drives -- one for backups. So I did, and for a while I've been doing nightly incremental backups, and it's been fine, but it's just SILLY.

Now, back in my geeky days, in these situations I'd boot up my Linux machine, mirror my journaled filesystem onto another hard drive, and be happy knowing that if one drive died, the other one would still be up and running.

I knew that Microsoft was about 25 (literally, really) years behind the times when they released mirroring for Windows 2000, so I figured I might try doing the same on my Windows XP Professional machine.

So I go in and I convert the two disks to dynamic volumes. It reboots. It then reboots again. And then it comes up and they're both dynamic volumes, so I'm ready to try doing the mirroring (note that in Linux you don't need dynamic volumes to mirror, but no one at Microsoft actually goes to school before they start working there, so they're all idiots, and I hate them, and they'll never actually take the time to get educated because people don't care if their software developers are educated; I hate people too, by the way). Then I notice that that option is greyed out. I can create a new SPANNED volume. I can create a new STRIPED volume. I can create a new SIMPLE volume. I CANNOT convert my disk back to basic mode (which is another thing that pisses me off). And I definitely cannot mirror. I can see the option; it's just greyed out.

So I do a little searching and find out that Windows XP Pro **CAN** create mirrored volumes on **REMOTE** Windows 2000 Server (and Advanced Server) machines. Windows 2000 Server/Advanced Server machines can also locally create mirrored volumes too.

So I'm pretty pissed. Now, my university does give me Windows Server 2003 for free, and it might be worth an install, but I really don't want to deal with that. I don't want to run IIS (which I think *IS* available to me on this stupid machine) or MS-SQL server or anything else. I just want to mirror my damn drives JUST LIKE AN AVERAGE CIVILIZED PERSON!!!

Everyone in the world should have an operating system that can do software mirroring. It just MAKES NO SENSE OTHERWISE.

Maybe I'll get lucky and Dell will have installed an ATA controller that does hardware RAID-1. That'd be sufficient. That'd be a better. And, of course, because we're dealing with Dell and not Apple (or me if I had built it myself), that'd be a pipe dream.

For anyone reading this who doesn't know what I mean, know that I partially blame you for creating a market of ignorant idiots. We might have quality computers if it wasn't for this market.