Fscking Server

So the house server PC, which sits under the desk in my study, has been getting a little noisy lately so I thought I'd move it further back and while I was at it I'd vacuum under there as it hadn't been done for a long while.

This was a mistake.

All went swimmingly at first. The carpet is now green again. I eliminated some cables we no longer needed, threw out a dead PC, and re-routed some other cables. I also opened the server case and vacuumed inside there, which was well worth it.

Then I tried to re-boot.

Oh dear, it didn't come up. It couldn't detect either of the hard drives. They're a pair of 320GB PATA drives in a software RAID-1 array. Surely both couldn't have failed at the same time? Anyway cutting to the chase I eventually determined that the primary drive had died. Disconnect that and the server could see the secondary. It couldn't boot off it mind you as there was no boot record.

So I tried to use a recovery CD to fix that and it wouldn't boot. In fact it didn't even seem to read the drive at all although the BIOS was detecting it.

As that was the secondary master I now started to suspect the motherboard so I moved both drives into a spare PC.

Here I could at least boot off the CD although the primary hard drive was indeed dead. So I ran up the CD in recovery mode, used grub to install an MBR on the primary slave and then I could boot.

Hurrah!

But it wasn't over. I then spent another hour trying to work out why dmesg reported it was setting up the network card as eth0 but there was no eth0 afterwards.

Beth worked it out in the end: it had created it as eth1 - arghhhhh!

And that's five hours of my life which I'll never see again.

So tomorrow it's off to buy either another hard drive or a complete new server. In the meantime I'm getting on the outside of a small Armagnac as I type this.