Today I had the pleasure of going on-site at a clients office. Usually I am tied to my desk, with all the calls and meetings and emails. I rarely can get away, so this was a welcome change. Turns out the office server would not boot after they moved to a new location. I had the sneaking suspicion that the server would be some ancient beast, and that the spindle motor on one of the hard drives would be dead. That is always one of my biggest concerns with disturbing a server who has happily been working away in one spot for literally years. Below is the summary email I sent to the office manager and her direct manager. Names changed to protect the innocent, of course. I wrote it sort of "stream of consciousness", without going back and rewriting, removing, jostling sentences, etc. Even looking at it now, I feel it could be written much better, but I am at a loss on how to improve it. Anyway, here it is, in full form below:

From: notreally@bur.gr

To: xyz@gmail.com

Subject: Server Failure

Hello OfficeManager,

Here is a summary of what I found when I visited the XYZ Office. The server refused to boot off of the RAID array. The RAID array is 3 SCSI hard drives off of a hardware based RAID controller, in a RAID5 configuration. Checking in the RAID controller configuration utility, 2 of the 3 drives were in a failed state, meaning they were not operational. A 3 drive RAID5 array can sustain 1 failed drive, but not 2 failed drives. There is no way to determine when the drives failed. But, seeing that the array was initialized in early 2002, the drives are rather old. It is not inconceivable that one drive could have failed unnoticed in the past, and the second was ready to fail at any point and the move was the last straw.

OtherLady informed me that the server backups were not being done regularly. There may be a good chance of recovering the data by sending all 3 hard drives to a data recovery house. This is a situation where an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, recovering from tape backup is much cheaper than having a data recovery house work on failed drives. I do not have pricing on using a data recovery house, but here are some links to some well-known companies. They usually provide free estimates, be sure to mention that the problem is with a failed 3 drive RAID5 array, as this is a more complex recovery.

http://www.drivesavers.com/
http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/
http://www.diskdoctors.com/

Let me know if you have any questions.

-Bur.gr

Photo: digital_chainsaw @ Flickr