Today our primary server decided to take a ****. The server housed two 80 gig SATA harddisk’s in a Raid 0. Unfortunatley, the weekly backup was also on the server and I did not have a chance to transfer it before this happened. There are alot of important files that I need to get off the server. My problem is, if I hook these back up and attempt to log into Windows, the directory service has become corrupt, and I can not to any type of restore of it. I NEED to get these files back. I already replaced the harddisk’s with two Western Digital 360 gig drives in a Raid 1 if this decides to happen again.
Hahaha, it may be, it it’d be damn quicker than trying to deal with Windows. I concur about the tape drives though. If the data is that important, you should always have a backup of a backup at least.
Operating system is Windows 2003. I can get into the recovery console just fine. I attempted to plug the drives directly in to recover data, but am unable to access one drive. We have a tape drive, but it does not do a complete system backup of the server, only database files. The complete server backup was just to a file, and then would be transfered.
that is why mirrored is important if you’re going to fragment your data across disks… with raid 0 the drives are beat if you lose one because the disks write fragmented…
why would he boot knoppix when he can just boot bartsPE? all you do with barts is put the drivers files in a folder and burn the disk… this isn’t a desktop with IDE drives… it’s much more logical to use a barts or winpe disk… like 10000times more logical. have you ever booted knoppix and installed raid drivers, not even to mention finding the appropriate raid driver for linux? why go through the hassle just to recover windows data anyway…
You were not really specific about why the server took a ****. If you lost a hard drive, then you’re fucked. If the system board crapped out, you should be able to plug the drives into a different motherboard that supports RAID 0 and recover the data.
RAID 0 should only be used in cases where extreme drive speed is needed (especially write speed) and the data is either expendable or backed-up religiously. RAID 0 offers you NO data protection whatsoever. In fact you don’t even have to lose a drive, if you lose a SECTOR you are fucked because of the way the data is striped across multiple drives.
I might be able to recover the old drives with one of my suppliers using an expensive recovery program, which is better than the one I have and they are not that expensive.
The company that we bought the server from had it mirrored as Raid0, I got the drives hooked up and was able to login with Sade Mode with Networking to transfer the files I needed. Were looking into the Adaptec SNAP server NAS or SAN storage for cases like these. Thanks guys!
The tape backup only did a specific database, it did not do a system state backup. I used a different program to make a backup of the whole drive, and then would do a weekly transfer. The old tape drive was only a 40/80, since then we bought a new backup with 160/320 capacity.
