It was the afternoon before a major match when a well known Dublin stadium discovered that their Dell PowerEdge R805 server running Windows Server 2003 was no longer booting. Upon boot-up they were greeted with a “disk error occurred” error message. They tried to perform a RAID rebuild but the rebuild process would not even initialise for them. Their server was running MySQL which was tied to their retail POS software. Without this server, most of their tills for their restaurants, shops and bars would be non-operational. Without some of their receipts to customers would have to be hand-written. They needed a solution and needed one fast.
With such a limited time frame, Drive Rescue pulled out all the stops to help them. We went onsite to perform the initial diagnosis. The drives were configured in RAID 0 (known colloquially as “scary RAID” for it’s total lack of redundancy when it does fail).
We removed the 2 x Dell Constellation 500GB entreprise-class S-ATA drives and brought them back to our lab. Drive 0 was in rude health. Drive 1 had over 29,000 bad blocks which had to be reallocated. Using a hex-editor, we manually rebuilt the MBR. Then we went performed the RAID rebuild process including finding parameters such as block order, block size, stripe size and RAID offset.
With the volume now rebuilt and extracted onto two new 500GB drives. We then configured it so that it would be bootable again. Understandably, with a major match looming in the stadium later that day the client would not have enough time to re-install and the operating system and all ancillary software.
Using a hex-editor, we manually rebuilt the MBR. Then we went to perform the RAID rebuild process, including finding parameters such as block order, block size, stripe size and RAID offset.
With the volume now rebuilt and extracted onto two new 500GB drives. We then configured it so that it would be bootable again. Understandably, with a major match looming in the stadium later that day the client would not have enough time to re-install and the operating system and all ancillary software.
After burning some midnight oil, the following morning we delivered the two disks containing the recovered volume and connected them to their server. The power button was pressed and some reassuring beeps were heard and finally the Window Server 2003 logo appeared followed shortly by the desktop screen. Sigh of relief all round! Now their retail operations would not be interrupted and they could safely scupper their plan B of writing out receipts with paper and pen!