I bought a new MoBo, processor, and some 3TB HDDs last week and am currently setting up a clean installation of Windows 8 on the machine.

The MoBo is an Asus RoG Maximus VII Ranger (What?! It was decently-priced. And shiny. o.o) with the on-board Intel Rapid Storage Tech semi-hardware-RAID thingy. I've configured a RAID5 array with three of the 3TB disks (I'm already aware that a three-disk array with large drives isn't ideal, but I plan to rectify that later by expanding the array).

Windows 8 installed successfully on the resulting 5.4TB array (on the third attempt… >:/) using an MBR partitioning table. Once the machine was running and I'd installed all the hardware drivers for networking, etc, on it, I used AOMEI Partition Assistant to convert the disk to use GPT. This succeeded, and upon rebooting the UEFI bootloader throws an error complaining that a required device is missing, which I expected.

I'm currently booted to the Windows 8 Install DVD in order to fix the problem. After loading the IRST RAID driver, I used diskpart to list the volumes on disk 0, which correctly showed the 350MB boot partition created by the installer, and my 5.4TB C:\ partition.

When I run bootrec /scanos, it gives the following output:

Successfully scanned Windows installations.
Total identified Windows installations: 1
[1] C:\Windows
The operation completed successfully.


However, when I run bootrec /fixboot, I receive this error:

The system cannot find the path specified.


I get the same error from bootrec /rebuildbcd.

What am I doing wrong?


Question: Dealing with non-required user input
Answer: If LINQ sounds like a foreign language, this might not be your most immediately productive option, but Entity Framework isn't that new, and you'd be astonished at how neatly it abstracts away all this boilerplate code. This isn't really a review, because it's a completely different approach, but for what it's worth I find the first listing perfectly readable and much better than casting anything to Object, even if AddWithValue actually takes an Object - I prefer these conversions implicit.

So here it goes - say you have an entity like this:

public class Client
{
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public string FirstName { get; set; }
    public string LastName { get; set; }
    public DateTime? DateOfBirth { get; set; } // this one is nullable, DateTime? is shorthand for Nullable&lt;DateTime&gt;
    public string Address { get; set; }
}


You can easily find lots of tutorials online about using Entity Framework, but for the sake of displaying your case, you'll need a class that derives from DbContext to hold all your DbSets, which hold your entities:

public class MyContext : DbContext
{
    public MyContext(string connectionString)
        : base(connectionString)
    { }

    public IDbSet&lt;Client&gt; Clients { get; set; }
    // ...

    public override void OnModelCreating(DbModelBuilder modelBuilder)
    {
        // customize entity mappings here
        base.OnModelCreating(modelBuilder);
    }
}


There are multiple ways to do this, but whatever you do EF needs to know how entities map to tables and properties map to columns - hence Object/Relational Mapper, and if you don't do anything about it EF will try to make it work by convention, and this means you only write the mapping/ModelBuilder code you need to write.

Now that you've got your entity and a context (you'll need proper configuration in app.config, and the connection string to use can be also inferred from config/context), you're ready to use it.

First thing you'll need is to decouple you UI from your data. This may seem redundant, but you'll want a ViewModel for use in your UI, rather than directly using the entity type (although that would still work). The idea is to not expose stuff that doesn't belong on the UI, notably the Id:

public class ClientViewModel
{
    public string FirstName { get; set; }
    public string LastName { get; set; }
    public DateTime? DateOfBirth { get; set; }
    public string Address { get; set; }
}


Now this is nice if all you need is to create new clients or display existing ones, but at one point you'll want to update an existing client and you'll want that Id back. I've posted my idea for converting between data and presentation types here on CR, and got good feedback - it was meant for use with WPF, but it can't hurt to take a look ;)

So, assuming we don't care about the Id of an existing Client yet, and only want to create a new one. What your UI code will do is fill up a ClientViewModel instance, with all the required and missing optional values.

I'm not very familiar with web dev (I know, I really should get into that), but I'd try to databind my ViewModel with the form fields (I'm sure it's supported), again to minimize boilerplate code.

Then you can have a "Model" class that works with your DbContext to do all the gruntwork - which is nowhere near the kind of gruntwork you're :

public class MyModel
{
    private readonly MyContext _context;

    public MyModel(MyContext context)
    {
        _context = context;
    }

    public void AddClientAndSave(ClientViewModel client)
    {
        var entity = new Client 
                          { 
                              FirstName = client.FirstName,
                              LastName = client.LastName,
                              DateOfBirth = client.DateOfBirth,
                              Address = client.Address
                          };
        _context.Clients.Add(entity);
        _context.SaveChanges();
    }
}


Just an example, but you get the point: no one gives a rat's ass about which field maps to a nullable or required column, except the mapping code. When you save your new client, give it a null value if that's what you need, provide an actual value if that's what you want. That's all! No SqlCommand, no parameters, no inline sql or anything. Just the code that gets it done.