I went on holiday for a few days last week and as is really quite typical, it was during this holiday that my server decided to fail.
What made this particularly annoying was I had intended to use my server as remote storage for my photographs. Considering the holiday was my first abroad since 1998, I felt some form of backup for photographs would be important. That plan had to be abandoned when I could no longer gain access on Tuesday 3 August.
As far as I can establish, a power failure of an unknown magnitude occurred at some point on Tuesday. When I came home, I discovered that the Sky box had reset which can happen with the smallest glitches. Normally after a failure, the computer restarts and all is well. However the server had no power when I returned home in the early hours of Thursday morning. I switched the machine on and ignored the numerous beeps emitted by the PC speaker being too tired to acknowledge them.
Realising the next day that I still could not access the server, I took the monitor from my normal machine, connected it to the server along with a spare keyboard and discovered that the CMOS had reset to its defaults. I checked over the BIOS settings and all seeming well, booted the server. What I didn't notice however was that there was no mention on bootup of the SATA to IDE controller to which my data drive was connected. When I noticed a few failure messages on start, I tried to access the data drive but was unsuccessful.
Panic started to set in at this point. Had I lost nearly 1TB of data? I took the drive out of the server and plugged it into my more modern general use machine. I could feel and hear the hum of the drive spinning and the BIOS detected it. Thank goodness, it seemed to be intact.
I then did a little experiment, powering the drive from my general machine, but connecting the drive to the server's SATA controller. Still the server did not recognise it. That led me to deduce that the onboard SATA controller on my server had failed.
So that left me with a dilemma. How do I get this drive reconnected to the server? Could I buy a new controller card? I did some research but the cheaper cards did not appear to be reliable with Linux. More expensive cards were out of my price range. So the alternative was to run the data drive as an external USB drive. I purchased an enclosure suitable for a 3.5" SATA drive and that arrived today.
I was very impressed to find that on connecting the drive to the server via USB, it was instantly detected and mounted at the correct point meaning everything instantly came back to life! Panic over!
Fortunately I had run a partial backup of this drive so if it had failed, I wouldn't have lost everything. Unfortunately though I don't have enough storage space to do a full backup of nearly 1TB. This scare has led me to realise I really need to get this sorted as soon as possible. I'll probably look at a solution to backup up to 2TB of data considering I am now recording HD home videos which consume a lot of space. I think 1TB of space will be consumed reasonably quickly.
What made this particularly annoying was I had intended to use my server as remote storage for my photographs. Considering the holiday was my first abroad since 1998, I felt some form of backup for photographs would be important. That plan had to be abandoned when I could no longer gain access on Tuesday 3 August.
As far as I can establish, a power failure of an unknown magnitude occurred at some point on Tuesday. When I came home, I discovered that the Sky box had reset which can happen with the smallest glitches. Normally after a failure, the computer restarts and all is well. However the server had no power when I returned home in the early hours of Thursday morning. I switched the machine on and ignored the numerous beeps emitted by the PC speaker being too tired to acknowledge them.
Realising the next day that I still could not access the server, I took the monitor from my normal machine, connected it to the server along with a spare keyboard and discovered that the CMOS had reset to its defaults. I checked over the BIOS settings and all seeming well, booted the server. What I didn't notice however was that there was no mention on bootup of the SATA to IDE controller to which my data drive was connected. When I noticed a few failure messages on start, I tried to access the data drive but was unsuccessful.
Panic started to set in at this point. Had I lost nearly 1TB of data? I took the drive out of the server and plugged it into my more modern general use machine. I could feel and hear the hum of the drive spinning and the BIOS detected it. Thank goodness, it seemed to be intact.
I then did a little experiment, powering the drive from my general machine, but connecting the drive to the server's SATA controller. Still the server did not recognise it. That led me to deduce that the onboard SATA controller on my server had failed.
So that left me with a dilemma. How do I get this drive reconnected to the server? Could I buy a new controller card? I did some research but the cheaper cards did not appear to be reliable with Linux. More expensive cards were out of my price range. So the alternative was to run the data drive as an external USB drive. I purchased an enclosure suitable for a 3.5" SATA drive and that arrived today.
I was very impressed to find that on connecting the drive to the server via USB, it was instantly detected and mounted at the correct point meaning everything instantly came back to life! Panic over!
Fortunately I had run a partial backup of this drive so if it had failed, I wouldn't have lost everything. Unfortunately though I don't have enough storage space to do a full backup of nearly 1TB. This scare has led me to realise I really need to get this sorted as soon as possible. I'll probably look at a solution to backup up to 2TB of data considering I am now recording HD home videos which consume a lot of space. I think 1TB of space will be consumed reasonably quickly.