I ran across a great article that explains the differences between WIN8 new “Refresh” and Restore” options:
Here is a great article that shows 9 Start Menu options for WIN 8 as well as a bit of discussion as to why the start button was removed.
WinX DVD Ripper is giving away free copies of their great program until the 21st of Dec. Get you copy Here!
“I’m occasionally impressed by the things some of the people do — especially the people finding some really obscure way to take some innocent-looking bug and turn it into an exploit — but then in order to take advantage of their discovery they have to take that really interesting intellectual exercise and turn it into this really sordid affair. It’s either some (very) thinly veiled blackmail behind some ‘best security practices’ bullshit, or it’s a carefully orchestrated PR event with the timing set so that they look important and interesting.”
– Linus Torvalds
So, I broke open my new dual bay external HDD enclosure last night and tried my best to it working. It just seem like I will never get this thing figured out. That’s NOT something I ever say about a tech gizmo. I purchased it used on Ebay and therefor received no manuals driver disks or any documentation at all. I
Step 1) I installed two drives, a 500 GIG and a 650 GIG. I knew that it is not the best thing to have mismatched drives attached to a hardware RAIB, but the only other 500 GIG drive I had on hand that was available. My NAS has a 500 GIG SATA drive, but I did not want to dismantle it.
Step 2) Hooked the enclosure up to my WIN8 Pro i7 rig by USB. I went to the disk mgr interface and the drive showed up as an “offline” 8 GIG drive. NOT good. I tried to enable the drive but that failed every time I tried.
Step 3) Go to internet to find drivers. 
I actually managed to find a GUI interface from the RAID chipset manufacturer that I installed. It had a password set for any admin functions. The PDF that came with the GUI install gave the default password and that worked! Score one for me.
Step 4) Realize that in spite of all your work, it looks like this thing has trouble with the mismatched drives. It looks like someone bleed all over the drive info section. Usually you can just use an equal amount of space on the larger drive to carry on with the stripe..
Step 5) Find and install updated firmware and GUI. After this the drive disappeared from windows and the GUI tool and that is where I stand for now.
So WIN 8 has been out for a few weeks and I am wondering if anyone has any thoughts? I am still impressed with the speed and stability however I still HATE the tiles. I have ordered a dual bay ESATA/USB external enclosre so I will be trying to build one large “Storage Space” with at least 4 hard drives. I hope to get the parts by this weekend. If anyone has any thoughts on WIN 8 please add them below!
I changed my lappys dual boot from Win 7 and Win 8. I left the Win 7 Enterprise in place of course because I need that for work of course. I installed a couple versions of 64 bit Linux all based on Ubuntu 12.10 and encountered LOTS of driver issues. I then reverted to plain Ubuntu 12.4 and all is well. It seems that the 12.10 drivers still need some polish!
