Want to know the quickest way to see if you have a hot swap hard drive on your server? Pull out one of the drives and see what happens.
Saturday afternoon 12pm I get a frantic in-house IT call.
C: OMG my server is asking me to reinstall the operating system!
Me: What happened?
C: I pulled out one of the bad drives to replace it and put in the new one.. It blue screened on me and this screen popped up. I looked at all three backups and the most current one is from 5 days ago.
Me: Ok 5 days worth of data is better than no data. What would you like to do? Do you want to do a fresh install on the new hard drives that we purchased 7 months ago or do you just want to get up and running?
by this time the in house IT person is incoherent and trying to talk through tears. I tell them that I am on my way and I will be there in approx 30 minutes. I pack up my bag, print the product codes and head that way.
C: OMG I didn’t think you were coming.
Me: I told you I would be here in 30 minutes, it took me 25. How about you go get us supper and I will get started.
more incoherent-ness
Me: I order online at x and already paid for my meal, could you please go pick it up?
I begin installing the new hard drives and configuring the RAID 5. In the meantime looking at all the backups that were in place and sure enough only 1 out of the three were working properly and since the hard drive was failing the most recent was 5 days ago. No problem. The previous IT person had installed the server as a RAID 0 so data recovery would be near impossible.
At this point the RAID configuration could take hours so I start to eat supper.
C: akroht aoekrjhoih asorhta lkhdflgae lhalsrntals lakrhtlnvaroijaok aordjhzldmbnzdfb
Me: what?
C: akroht aoekrjhoih asorhta lkhdflgae lhalsrntals lakrhtlnvaroijaok aordjhzldmbnzdfb
Me: you are going to have to take a deep breath, I have no clue what you are trying to tell me
C: Do you think you can get this back up and running before my boss finds out?
Me: Well your boss already knows, when I created the ticket it sends and automatic email to him to let him know that a service ticket has been created. He called me on the phone while I was on my way over here. He asked me about how long and will it be up before Monday.
C: OMG he is going to fire me
Me: Let’s just worry about the task at hand. You can worry about that Monday.
16 hours later. The server was back up and running with all new hard drives and only lost 5 days worth of data. Not bad if you ask me.
