Well, redefine is finally almost-kindof happy again. I have reverted from running FreeBSD 6.1-STABLE to FreeBSD 4.11-RELEASE, and from running on two disks in a hardware RAID configuration to one single disk on the built-in IDE controller. For the last two weeks, it has seemed like every time that I have touched my computing environment in an effort to make things better, I have actually made things work.
The icing on the cake occurred last Friday, when I managed to break things so badly in the two hours leading up to Rushabh's arrival that none of my readily-available machines would boot off the RAID, and hence I was blocked from accessing my data. In order to get it back, I had to cannibalize my Shuttle SN95G5 (which was serving as my MythTV machine) in order to get things back.
This weekend, I'm going to be hitting this RAID card pretty hard, to see where I need to go from here. At this point, the thought of ditching it in favor of software RAID is sounding fairly compelling.
-Andy.