18-08-2012, 06:03 PM
After four years of non stop sterling work the WD Mybook storage server on my network decided to up sticks and stop last night. The unit was totally unresponsive to queries and several reboots didn't bring it back so it was disconnected for the night and a clear head in the morning.
AM today, and a manual reset allowed access to the system management pages inside the box that was flagging up a HDD failure. The 1Tb drive had apparently expired but for some reason the management system which runs under Linux had managed to load its operating system off of an HDD partition on the drive. Not so dead then, or so I thought. The drive was obviously suspect so after much cursing and splitting of housing case I had a nice HDD, a SATA WD Green WD10EACS drive made on the 6th May 2008 in my hands. Two problems, how to test the drive to see if it was faulty and if not how to recover the data.
The main study computer is SATA based and after finding the correct leads the hardware interface side was taken care of. Now to check the drive, a pain as the system was Linux partitioned and this PC was predominantly a Win7 machine. A tip here, not all Linux distros can see WD server HDDs as I found out but a boot up using a CD copy of Puppy Linux run time version recognised the HDD and mounted it up first time along with my primary Win7 boot HDD. Getting better and better at this stage.
Puppy Linux allowed full access to the HDD contents, proving that the HDD was in working order with no issues. It appears that the fault with the server was on the management hardware side of the system and not the HDD. The server software could see the outside world with no issues and interact but for some reason could not see the HDD or its contents. There was clearly some sort of black hole on the hardware between the LAN access point and the HDD.
Now that I have recovered the data off of the drive I'm going to re-assemble the unit and test again but I'm not enthusiastic as to the results. However, for four years stirling service I can't really complain that much, after all the Natwest/RBS servers are not that reliable either. If your in a similar fix, Puppy Linux will get in there where other Linux distros will run away in terror.
AM today, and a manual reset allowed access to the system management pages inside the box that was flagging up a HDD failure. The 1Tb drive had apparently expired but for some reason the management system which runs under Linux had managed to load its operating system off of an HDD partition on the drive. Not so dead then, or so I thought. The drive was obviously suspect so after much cursing and splitting of housing case I had a nice HDD, a SATA WD Green WD10EACS drive made on the 6th May 2008 in my hands. Two problems, how to test the drive to see if it was faulty and if not how to recover the data.
The main study computer is SATA based and after finding the correct leads the hardware interface side was taken care of. Now to check the drive, a pain as the system was Linux partitioned and this PC was predominantly a Win7 machine. A tip here, not all Linux distros can see WD server HDDs as I found out but a boot up using a CD copy of Puppy Linux run time version recognised the HDD and mounted it up first time along with my primary Win7 boot HDD. Getting better and better at this stage.
Puppy Linux allowed full access to the HDD contents, proving that the HDD was in working order with no issues. It appears that the fault with the server was on the management hardware side of the system and not the HDD. The server software could see the outside world with no issues and interact but for some reason could not see the HDD or its contents. There was clearly some sort of black hole on the hardware between the LAN access point and the HDD.
Now that I have recovered the data off of the drive I'm going to re-assemble the unit and test again but I'm not enthusiastic as to the results. However, for four years stirling service I can't really complain that much, after all the Natwest/RBS servers are not that reliable either. If your in a similar fix, Puppy Linux will get in there where other Linux distros will run away in terror.
