Category Archives: Disaster recovery

Motherboard ethernet port went bad

Posted on October 19, 2010 by Eric

The onboard ethernet port of my Asus M4A785TD-M EVO motherboard went bad.  It was working fine, then all of a sudden quit.  Neither Windows nor Linux can detect that the Ethernet chip is even present, e.g., not even with an … Continue reading →

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Suboptimal RAID card behavior on drive failure and suboptimal Seagate web-based customer service

Posted on November 20, 2009 by Eric

On Monday morning I got email from the RAID controller on one of my servers, stating that a drive had been “removed”.  I went to the colo, and found that while the drives were all physically present, the controller was … Continue reading →

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New computer preloaded with craplets including Norton 360

Posted on July 15, 2009 by Eric

My sister’s office PC was damaged by lightning, so she got a new emachines PC at Costco, and I’m helping her get it set up.  It came with Vista, of course.  And a bunch of craplets, including Norton 360 with … Continue reading →

Posted in Disaster recovery, The Suboptimal Way | 7 Comments

RAID Capacity Expansion, the Suboptimal Way, or How Not to Have a Fun Weekend

Posted on November 19, 2007 by Eric

On Friday, I needed to add disk space to the RAID 5 array on my server. I’m using a 3ware 9550SX-8LP RAID controller, which I’ve generally been very happy with. It has support for online capacity expansion, so I decided … Continue reading →

Posted in Disaster recovery, Hardware, The Suboptimal Way | 7 Comments

/home partition recovered

Posted on September 22, 2006 by Eric

I was able to recover the /home partition from the disk that Windows clobbered a week ago.  Windows overwrote the partition table, and none of the usual methods I’ve used for data recovery were able to find it, nor was … Continue reading →

Posted in Disaster recovery, Linux | 2 Comments

Screwed by Windows again!

Posted on September 15, 2006 by Eric

I’m trying to copy an NTFS partition from an external USB drive to a spare partition on the internal IDE drive of my laptop.  In the process, before I’d even so much as gotten Ghost to start doing anything, Windows … Continue reading →

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Backing up a damaged DVD

Posted on December 5, 2005 by Eric

I have a damaged DVD that will no longer play in my DVD player. My computer seems to be able to read it OK. The official position of the MPAA is that I’m shit-outa-luck, and should just buy another copy. … Continue reading →

Posted in Disaster recovery, DRM, DVD, HD-DVD, Blu-ray, Linux | Leave a comment

Disk drive failure

Posted on April 25, 2005 by Eric

A 200G drive in one of my RAID systems failed today. Since it was RAID 5, no data was lost. However, the original drive had an actual capacity of 203G, while new ones sold with the identical part number are … Continue reading →

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Fire

Posted on August 14, 2003 by Eric

Originally Mike thought only his garage and a small portion of the house needed to be torn down and rebuilt. However, it has now been determined that the entire house must be torn down. Mike has been able to recover … Continue reading →

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Fire photos

Posted on August 13, 2003 by Eric

I’ve just set up an album of photos of my server after the fire.

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