Friday, September 05, 2003

Or Not

(sigh) Must learn to cross-check files before the next backup runs (and I even corrupted the history logs). Apparently, there was some sort of mild corruption issue going on with the NTFS volume because there are collections of files that are the correct size, but the internals are scrambled (and these were not encrypted files).

So, I have a bit of a mess now, although the damage seems localized and I get to spend the weekend pulling stuff back off of DVD/CD. Probably the most annoying is that I'm going to likely end up re-ripping my entire audio CD collection rather then go through and attempt to verify every song in every folder.

posted by Wuphon's at 11:14 PM

Tuesday, September 02, 2003

Rebuild

Well, so far it looks like most of the data on the 275Gb partition is intact. Most of what got scrambled was the EFS protected files and I'm in the process of pulling those back from the backups. I'm still not 100% sure why Windows decided to scramble the NTFS volume.

posted by Wuphon's at 10:16 AM

Monday, September 01, 2003

Removing Domain Controllers

And, since the server that crashed is also a domain controller, I have to go the long way round to pull it out of Active Directory.

HOW TO: Remove Data in Active Directory After an Unsuccessful Domain Controller Demotion

posted by Wuphon's at 5:18 PM

Whirrr, Buzzz

Which is the metaphorical sound that Windows 2000 makes when it CHKDSK's a drive's file system into oblivion. So, now I'm off to rebuild my 300Gb array server and hope that my backup methods were as good as I thought they were. That's not to say that the main partition isn't recoverable... but it's a bit of wait-n-see at this point.

However, after watching CHKDSK run for hours (lots of orphaned files, maybe 4 hours of processing so far), I'm very curious to see just how scrambled the disk is going to end up. I strongly suspect that I'll be pulling files off of the backup drive rather then attempt to verify whether the files are intact or not.

(Oh, and I'm back from NY, took all day Saturday to fix the server - and I stopped at the Philly Zoo on Sunday on my way back from NY... so I slept in quite late today before starting to tackle the 2nd crashed server.)

Labels: Win2000

posted by Wuphon's at 5:08 PM