[PANTUGGeneral] Bizarre
Eric
About a month ago I had a customer lose power at their office due to the snow
storm. When the systems were restarted the Windows 2000 server file server kept
freezing after some short but random period of time - 30 to 120 minutes was
typical.
I tested a number of things including a detailed analysis of the hard drive
(RAID mirror - motherboard controller) and running chkdsk.
Eventually, between tests it started running longer and finally on Sunday
evening, 2/14 it just took off and ran. One more reboot on Tuesday 2/16, and it
has run perfectly ever since.
Last night it was shut down to prepare for a scheduled office building power
outage. This morning it would not start but instead blue-screened because of a
corrupt or missing registry hive.
Now, it gets really, really strange.
Using Knoppix, I boot the server and copy the data to a separate USB hard drive.
We discover that NO files were added or updated since 2/2/2010. It's as though
I was looking at the hard drive ~34 days ago. But files WERE added and the WERE
updated.
I suddenly begin to wonder if Linux reads the NTFS metadata differently than
Windows does :-)
Has anyone seen a problem like this? If so, what did you do???!
Eric
--
# Eric Lucas
#
# "Oh, I have slipped the surly bond of earth
# And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings...
# -- John Gillespie Magee Jr
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Eric
> I'm holding my head with two hands and some duct tape to keep it from exploding.
>
> About a month ago I had a customer lose power at their office due to the snow
> storm. When the systems were restarted the Windows 2000 server file server kept
> freezing after some short but random period of time - 30 to 120 minutes was
> typical.
>
> I tested a number of things including a detailed analysis of the hard drive
> (RAID mirror - motherboard controller) and running chkdsk.
>
> Eventually, between tests it started running longer and finally on Sunday
> evening, 2/14 it just took off and ran. One more reboot on Tuesday 2/16, and it
> has run perfectly ever since.
>
> Last night it was shut down to prepare for a scheduled office building power
> outage. This morning it would not start but instead blue-screened because of a
> corrupt or missing registry hive.
>
> Now, it gets really, really strange.
>
> Using Knoppix, I boot the server and copy the data to a separate USB hard drive.
>
> We discover that NO files were added or updated since 2/2/2010. It's as though
> I was looking at the hard drive ~34 days ago. But files WERE added and the WERE
> updated.
>
> I suddenly begin to wonder if Linux reads the NTFS metadata differently than
> Windows does :-)
>
> Has anyone seen a problem like this? If so, what did you do???!
>
> Eric
>
I shut the system down and disconnected one of the two drives in the
RAID array.
When I rebooted it, all the missing data had returned. Every file.
Windows was still corrupted so I had to boot it with Knoppix but that
thankfully had no impact on the data.
One for the record books.
Troy Sorzano
>I shut the system down and disconnected one of the two drives in the
>RAID array.
>When I rebooted it, all the missing data had returned. Every file.
>Windows was still corrupted so I had to boot it with Knoppix but that
>thankfully had no impact on the data.
Glad to hear you resolved the issue. I felt your pain.
You solution is why I love mirroring. It gives you a chance of recovery if a drive, RAID hardware, RAID drivers or RAID software fails. It's the only RAID type I support for direct attached storage in my office. You can pull a drive and do data recovery very easily. Other RAID recover is a bitch even if you have the correct tools. I have done RAID 5 recovery, you need to figure out the exact setting http://www.runtime.org/raid.htm (free version will show you them). Then I use http://www.quetek.com/RAID.htm to get the data back. Other RAID types are not worth the perceived advantages over simple mirroring in my opinion. If you want fancier RAID get a real enterprise SAN.
Troy
Troy Sorzano
How to Use Symlinks in Windows [Windows Tip]
http://lifehacker.com/5496652/how-to-use-symlinks-in-windows
Anyone using them successfully on XP or server 2003?
Thanks,
Eric
I have never experienced this particular benefit of mirroring before but
it makes sense.
It appears the particular cost/benefit analysis that gave us the various
flavors of RAID is constantly changing as the cost per GB of storage
comes down and the sizes get larger.
Thanks,
Eric
--
# Eric Lucas
#
# "Oh, I have slipped the surly bond of earth
# And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings...
# -- John Gillespie Magee Jr
_______________________________________________
Drew Lehman
years ago. As the drives get larger, the rebuild time is growing,
meaning it is much more likely that another drive will fail while you
rebuild a previously failed drive. At the same time, cost of drives is
plummeting, pushing the choices wither to RAID 6 (2 extra drives) or
back to Mirroring. Of course the limitation of Mirroring is that you
really can't safely expand the drive size. Dynamic disks will expand it
to a second/third etc. mirrored drive sets, but it is not always
possible to take a 2 drive loss when you do this.
So the old ways of blindly putting in a RAID 5 need to be rethought.
Eric wrote:
> Troy:
>
> I have never experienced this particular benefit of mirroring before but
> it makes sense.
>
> It appears the particular cost/benefit analysis that gave us the various
> flavors of RAID is constantly changing as the cost per GB of storage
> comes down and the sizes get larger.
>
> Thanks,
> Eric
_______________________________________________
JP Vossen
> You learn something new every day. I had no idea windows could do symlinks until I read this article.
>
> How to Use Symlinks in Windows [Windows Tip]
> http://lifehacker.com/5496652/how-to-use-symlinks-in-windows
>
> Anyone using them successfully on XP or server 2003?
That's an interesting one. I was not aware of mklink, and it doesn't
seem to be installed on my XP system. From some very quick&dirty
Googling, this looks like it a built-in Vista+ command, so not available
in XP or below. :-( (Took 'em long enough. Unix has had sym and hard
links for how many decades now?)
I have used linkd to link directories (only) on NTFS on XP. That's a
ResKit util, e.g.:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9D467A69-57FF-4AE7-96EE-B18C4790CFFD
And I've used ntsubst.exe to map drive letters to local dirs. E.g. my
H: is on my file server, but when I travel H: is not there, so I copy
files local to C: then create a "fake" H: drive:
ntsubst H: C:\LOCAL\jp\MyDocs
Unfortunately, this util seems to have gone away, I can't find it on the
Net anymore; not even in
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.hhdsoftware.com/Download/ntsubst.exe.
Later,
JP
----------------------------|:::======|-------------------------------
JP Vossen, CISSP |:::======| http://bashcookbook.com/
My Account, My Opinions |=========| http://www.jpsdomain.org/
----------------------------|=========|-------------------------------
"Microsoft Tax" = the additional hardware & yearly fees for the add-on
software required to protect Windows from its own poorly designed and
implemented self, while the overhead incidentally flattens Moore's Law.
Buce, Michael
The article doesn't say, but it looks like the /j in their example creates a junction point. If that's the case, it is the same as linkd (maybe also combined with mountvol, which mounts one local drive to a folder in another local drive).
JP, do you have 'subst'? That does the same as the ntsubst you're referring to.
Thanks for the tips, guys!
---Michael
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JP Vossen
[...]
> The article doesn't say, but it looks like the /j in their example
> creates a junction point. If that's the case, it is the same as
> linkd (maybe also combined with mountvol, which mounts one local
> drive to a folder in another local drive).
That rings a bell, but I can't say for sure either. The linkd help does
talk about "a name space junction."
> JP, do you have 'subst'? That does the same as the ntsubst you're
> referring to.
I seem to recall there being a reason I was not able to use regular old
subst.exe. I have one laying around but it's giving me "Incorrect DOS
version" when I try to run it. OK, I found another one in
c:\windows\system32\subst.exe that seems to run. Hummmmm....
When I wrote the first reply to Troy I was mentally confusing the native
'subst' with the old 'assign' command which only "renames" drive
letters, so I didn't mention it. You jogged my memory on that issue,
but now I forget why I didn't just use native subst in the first place.
I'd like to think I had a good reason, but if so I didn't document it
and we're going back to circa 2002 here.