What we have here is a lack of redundancy

What kind of idiot stores his home directory and his entire web content on a striped set of four disks, with no redundancy?

Me, that’s who. You’d think I would have learned from January’s fiasco that disk crashes don’t just happen to other people. But back in January, I was (relatively) lucky, as the disk that crashed was part of a mirrored set. Not so this time.

The file server actually crashes when trying to read from the faulty disk, so I had to get creative and figure out a way of not only copying it to a healthy disk over the network, but doing so in a way that allows me to recover from crashes and continue where I left off. The result is ndr, the Network-assisted Disk Recovery tool. Continue reading “What we have here is a lack of redundancy”

Detect drives done, no any drive found

(actual diagnostic message from the on-board JMicron RAID controller on an Asus P5B-V motherboard)

I learned a few lessons on Monday:

Lesson the first
If you have a RAID 1 array, and one of the drives suddenly drops out of it, do not simply assume it was a software error and reassign it, or you will be very unhappy a few months later when that drive really fails. Continue reading “Detect drives done, no any drive found”