Along the Way…

Well, as I mentioned a few days ago, I had some hardware issues with my server. When I installed Vista on that machine a couple months ago, I had moved all the user profiles to a secondary hard drive, drive D. The drive cable had jostled loose, somehow, and caused Windows to revert back to drive C for the user profiles.

After fixing the cable, I rebooted the system, expecting to see my old profiles come back as I’ve seen it do in the past. They didn’t. The drive was perfectly usable, but I kept getting an “access denied” error when the operating system tried to access drive D to mount the profiles. As an interactive user, I had no access problems, just the operating system account had problems.

Well, being relatively unmotivated when it comes to fiddling with my system, I decided to reinstall Windows. That’s always a sure-fire cure for whatever’s wrong, right?

Oh, and since I’m going to be reinstalling the operating system anyway, why not switch to Windows Server 2008, not that it’s available on MSDN? I’ve been hearing great things about using it as a development platform, as an alternative to Vista, so it seemed a natural decision.

It’s still installing various roles and features, now, so we’ll see how I like it… so far, the installation went smoothly enough. It still doesn’t recognize my NVidia NForce 8650 out of the box, but once I downloaded the drivers from the NVidia site, I got my nice high resolution, multimonitor configuration back up and running. I’m also installing the User Experience feature, so I can still enjoy all the pretty eye candy of Vista!

I probably won’t get around to reinstalling Visual Studio, Resharper, SQL Server, Visual SVN, etc., until later in the week, so I won’t really get to experience coding on Windows Server 2008 for awhile. But, at least, I’ve got access to my media library again! I was in the middle of watching Highlander, Season 1, when the system went down, so I was anxiously waiting to get back to the show.