Hard Disk Recovery

The next machine with a bad hard drive was my server. This server has been running as a server in our home for about 8 years. HAH! Now that is not to say that we haven’t done upgrades, because we have. We have always kept the “data” area of the drive separate and even though that data area has grown over the years it is in essence exactly the way it has always been. When we need more room we just make a new array and transfer the data over. Now on the array are all of the things you would expect, backups of our desktop machine, pictures of the family, tax information, drivers for all of our machines, and all of our work/personal documents. On the day of the crash I go to access the data drive on the server and it is no longer there. I think to myself, “hmm that is odd, let me reboot the machine”.

So I reboot the server and when it starts to come up I have a message that the array is in critical state and that one of the drives has dropped out. Now note that this is a common problem with this array, so I just figure I will go into Windows Sever 2003 and add the drive back in, no problem. WRONG, the drive can’t be added back in, so now I am sitting with an array I can’t get to and all the data I have ever had on it. (That’s right I didn’t back up) I eventually have to take it to our RAID guy Dick Correa, and have him fix it for me. He had to pull one of the drives because it was physically gone.

He then had to de-stripe them, then harvest all of my data off, and put it all on a 500 gig external for me. It was a Maxtor 200gb IDE drive, and all the others drives in the array are the same so all that I can guess is that I am just having total bad luck. That drive model is known to be pretty stable and all the other drives in the array are still in good working condition.