So that was why the Innoavtive 3.5" HD Enclosure so magical

I kept forgetting how unique the Innovative 3.5" HD Enclosure is.  This is the harddisk enclosure that I used to connect to Wii.  I sometime complain about how this enclosure have problem ripping Wii ISO, like pause in the middle of a long ripping.  But today after tired out other enclosure, like the MASSCOOL enclosure, I started to realize that Innovative enclosure does NOT generate video noise when connected to the Wii.  On the other hand, MASSCOOL enclosure gave out some wavy noise that make it so irritating to look at.

The dual slot Cavalry also generate no noise when connected to Wii, and rip Wii ISO with no problem, but I just found it kind of a waste to connect that to a Wii.

Such stupid memory restriction ...

37.29Mb left on my Andriod.  Damn it.  I hate my HTC Desire.

Quick disk cloning

I was surprised that the Cacalry Dual-Bay Dock I brought was able to clone a full 1Tb harddisk within 5 hours.  So no doubt I am getting another set now.

I think I get the RAID 1 thing working even on different brand of harddisk

One thing I like about my new Cacalry Dual-Bay Dock is the ability of doing RAID 1.  That way, I will always have 2 copies of the same file, and whenever there's anything wrong with one drive, I will always have the second drive working.  And to resume to RAID, all I need to do it put a new same size drive in, and everything will work OK afterward.

However, I was puzzled by how I can prepare a drive to be used as the backup drive on RAID 1.  In fact, I tried that 2 days ago and it failed.  Turns out I was just not doing the right thing.

So here's the set up: I already have a 1Tb harddisk running properly.  It's the Z drive on my networked machine.  So I yanked that 1Tb drive from the hard disk enclosure and put it in the Cacalry Dual-Bay.  The system instantly recognize it as the Z drive.  So actually, all is well.

But when I put in a second drive (not freshly clean, but I wipe out the partition), I DID NOT see the RAID 1 copying kicking in.  I was puzzled.

Turns out I have to create the same partition BUT NOT initialized on the backup drive.  Once I did that, the Cacarly recognize it, and as far as I know, it is doing RAID 1 copying now.  Notice that both disks are 1Tb, but in different brand name.

If the copying goes well, then I will buy another Cacalry Dual-Bay Dock and with 2 2Tb disk.  I can always find ways to use up all the spaces.

Using Windows 7 Ultimate N Edition

My friend had a tablet PC with Windows 7 Home Premiere edition installed, and found out that he couldn't use Traditional Chinese hand recognition as it required Ultimate edition.  Since I had an MSDN accout and there were a few Windows 7 Ultimate  N edition (create to fulfill a EU lawsuit vertdict, which requires taking out all the Windows Media Player feature from the OS) left, I planned on installing it on my friend's machine.

We found out that we could not use Anytime update to update the current Home Premiere edition, and we also couldn't upgrade it using the MSDN installation disc.  So I had no choice but to install the OS from scratch.  We also found that the installation did not provide the option wipe the C drive (the only drive on the machine) clean before installation, but that's properly because we loaded the installation disc WITHIN the Windows 7 Home Premiere OS.  Should we boot the system directly from the disc, I am pretty sure that we can have the disc tool editions.  It's not a huge problem since Windows installation will put all the old stuff in Windows.old folder, and all I need to do it delete that folder.

Installation went flawlessly, in fact all the necessary hardware buttons were properly setup, like mute and volume buttons.  The installation does a great job to set up all the hardware specific drivers,

I then use Windows Update to install all the necessary language options, and after then and installing Traditional Chinese language in language option, I was able to use Chinese handwriting recognition.

The final thing that we didn't finished was the Microsoft Windows 7 N Media setup package intended to "patch up" the system so that all the missing media player feature would be put back.  My friend said he used his own player package (CCCP) instead of the Windows media player, so we didn't complete that.  Other than that, my friendly is now fully equipped with Windows 7 ultimate edition.