travis' brain dump

So I get a phone call this morning from a friend of mine at a landscaping company… evidently during the move of their primary server something went awry… The system no longer wanted to boot up and was complaining profusely. I made time as quickly as I could to come down to fix them up and much to my surprise when I arrived found that the worst case scenario was staring me in the face.

The system had been rebooted during bootup… One of the drives in the RAID array was showing as missing/failed and the state of the entire RAID volume was being listed as ‘ failed ‘ … uh oh … I would have happily taken a sign that the volume was running in a diminished capacity but this thing was ANGRY. Somehow by all grace I was able to bring the volume up into a rebuild state, but it was still unhappy, so I installed another disk to boot from and load up some utilities. The array went about its rebuilding just as happy as could be… After taking an hour or two to do so, I was able to then try to run CheckDisk on the partitions. The OS partition went pretty well, but the Data partition was all jacked up…. time to call in data recovery software… *fingers crossed* Currently it’s doing a sector scan of the drive and is at 38%… I’ve been at this 6 hours now. I’m hoping for some good news after this and hopefully be able to restore the financial files at the very least. Anything else on top of those is just icing on the cake.

I tell ya. This kinda stuff scares me. I’ve been put in this position two other times and it was uncomfortable then as it is now. It always sucks when you’ve got to do your best to restore what you can but in the end, regardless you have to hand them a pretty hefty bill no matter how much data you recovered. *shudder* I guess this little instance will nudge them towards some better practices in data backup. A positive in all of this. Let’s just hope it’s not at the expense of losing financial data. 🙁

43% – It’s picking up some speed. Well here’s hopin for a good report at the end of this… I’ll post up more later as I think I’m going to be at this a while. After I recover data, I have to reinstall the entire server. Then it’s rejoin the domain time for all the workstations which happen to be offsite so that’s going to have to wait until next week I think. (not sure when they are moving the rest of the workstations over here)

Cross your fingers for these guys folks, they’re gonna need it.