Server OS hard drive died
Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2007 12:01 am
The Server's OS HDD died sometime Thursday (the day I left for the weekend at the Portland Auto Swap Meet, naturally).
Apparently, the power was out for a loooong time, long enough to exhaust all three UPSs, and when it came back up, the OS drive was dead. This is the Operating System drive and it contains no user data.
I had spare HDDs but not the ~6 hours to reload the OS (I do not back
up the OS -- scarce resources and all).
And, as it turns out, the spare HDDs I have are too large -- physically -- to fit where the old one resided, so it too has to live "outside the box" in an external enclosure, along with the data drives.
Data is all backed up, no problem there.
I had to go find an old backup of the OS, which hasn't had any maintenance (software-wise) to speak of in several years. The backup I settled on was from 2003, and worked fine. I had to apply a single FixPak to it, and it was fine. Unfortunately, the PHP and MySQL installations keep their configuration files on the OS drive (why did I set it up like that?) and they went away, and I had to re-learn what values to plug in to them, and that took an extra night.
At any rate, all appears to be well now, and I took advantage of the downtime to haul the server to work and blow it all out of dust, took down all the fans and lubed them (the case's front fan has been making racket for six months!) and generally tidy things up a bit.
We are back in business!
To those who contacted me via email, I'm sorry I could not take the time to reply individually, and I hope the form letter made sense.
Apparently, the power was out for a loooong time, long enough to exhaust all three UPSs, and when it came back up, the OS drive was dead. This is the Operating System drive and it contains no user data.
I had spare HDDs but not the ~6 hours to reload the OS (I do not back
up the OS -- scarce resources and all).
And, as it turns out, the spare HDDs I have are too large -- physically -- to fit where the old one resided, so it too has to live "outside the box" in an external enclosure, along with the data drives.
Data is all backed up, no problem there.
I had to go find an old backup of the OS, which hasn't had any maintenance (software-wise) to speak of in several years. The backup I settled on was from 2003, and worked fine. I had to apply a single FixPak to it, and it was fine. Unfortunately, the PHP and MySQL installations keep their configuration files on the OS drive (why did I set it up like that?) and they went away, and I had to re-learn what values to plug in to them, and that took an extra night.
At any rate, all appears to be well now, and I took advantage of the downtime to haul the server to work and blow it all out of dust, took down all the fans and lubed them (the case's front fan has been making racket for six months!) and generally tidy things up a bit.
We are back in business!
To those who contacted me via email, I'm sorry I could not take the time to reply individually, and I hope the form letter made sense.
