Patience, part III
Guess what? Things didn't go according to plan...
I put the new Seagate drive in, went to connect the power and realised it only has SATA power connectors, not a standard IDE one as well. I had to run out to PC-World to get two convertors but they didn't have any. So I went to another PC-World and they didn't have any either. Whilst en-route back to the office I stopped off at home to see if I had one. Amazingly, I did. Still one short, but it'd do for now.
So I connected the new drive up and set it rebuilding. It failed. This now gives me irrefutable proof that at least some of the problem is with the remaining Western Digital drive.
So.... tonight I'm taking my own PC in (as it has SATA connectors - and I bought another power adaptor at lunchtime today from a computer shop down the road). Plan is to put the dodgy Western Digital drive in and a new Seagate drive in and use Acronis True Image (free 15 day trial - very handy!) to make a sector-by-sector image onto the Seagate drive. Hopefully this will work. It might not be able to read the file-system of the drive properly because it's half of a RAID array, but it claims to work with unknown filesystems in this method, as it literally does it sector-by-sector so it shouldn't matter. I can boot off a CD into True Image, usefully bypassing Windows. Then I can remove the WD drive and install the other Seagate drive and restore the image to that one. Then plug that one back into the server and see what happens. If it works, great, I can put the other Seagate drive in and have it rebuild the RAID. If it doesn't work because the RAID is messed up, then I'm screwed and I'll have to restore Windows... I really want to avoid doing that. But if I do have to I'll get a better RAID card first!
Still, at least I switched their internet access over whilst I was there from BT ADSL (boo!) to Telewest cable (yay!) which should be far more stable.
I hate computers.
I put the new Seagate drive in, went to connect the power and realised it only has SATA power connectors, not a standard IDE one as well. I had to run out to PC-World to get two convertors but they didn't have any. So I went to another PC-World and they didn't have any either. Whilst en-route back to the office I stopped off at home to see if I had one. Amazingly, I did. Still one short, but it'd do for now.
So I connected the new drive up and set it rebuilding. It failed. This now gives me irrefutable proof that at least some of the problem is with the remaining Western Digital drive.
So.... tonight I'm taking my own PC in (as it has SATA connectors - and I bought another power adaptor at lunchtime today from a computer shop down the road). Plan is to put the dodgy Western Digital drive in and a new Seagate drive in and use Acronis True Image (free 15 day trial - very handy!) to make a sector-by-sector image onto the Seagate drive. Hopefully this will work. It might not be able to read the file-system of the drive properly because it's half of a RAID array, but it claims to work with unknown filesystems in this method, as it literally does it sector-by-sector so it shouldn't matter. I can boot off a CD into True Image, usefully bypassing Windows. Then I can remove the WD drive and install the other Seagate drive and restore the image to that one. Then plug that one back into the server and see what happens. If it works, great, I can put the other Seagate drive in and have it rebuild the RAID. If it doesn't work because the RAID is messed up, then I'm screwed and I'll have to restore Windows... I really want to avoid doing that. But if I do have to I'll get a better RAID card first!
Still, at least I switched their internet access over whilst I was there from BT ADSL (boo!) to Telewest cable (yay!) which should be far more stable.
I hate computers.
posted by Nej at
1:34 pm
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home