Lord, I’ve been making a lot of GQ threads lately (by my normal, lurk-ish standards, anyway). Sorry about that – but once I started to learn what a fascinatingly brilliant community we have here, I began my slide into addiction.
Anyway, our power flicked off and back on earlier while my computer was on. It of course knocked it out, and when I turned it back on everything seemed fine. Just to be safe, I ran chkdsk and sfc /scannow. Checkdisk came back fine, but the system file checker is asking for my XP CD.
Well since I bought this guy off the rack, I have no XP CD.
I’ve read that I can somehow use the i386 folder on my computer to substitute for the lack of CD, but burning that folder to a CD and sticking it in doesn’t seem to placate the SFC.
Side note: I ran SFC as a part of my normal cleaning routine three or four days ago and it returned zero errors. Now, it’s registering about six (assuming each request for the CD represents one error). Even though my computer seems to be running okay, it’s making me feel all squicky that those errors exist. Is there any way to run SFC successfully without the accompanying CD? If not, how do I go about getting one?
A was a colleague of mine, another IT engineer. He got a call from a customer running a Netware server.
This customer wanted A to break his disk mirror because he was running out of disk space :smack:
After a round of discussion that ran along the lines of A: You don’t want to do that
C: Yes, I do A: You don’t, really
C: Yep, I do A: It’s a really bad idea
C: I need the space and won’t pay for a new disk, do it.
the job was booked in.
A turned up on a Friday evening to do the job. He asked to see the backup tape. He asked to see the backup job logs. He tested the backup by restoring a file.
All good.
He sat at the Netware console, logged in, and issued the break mirror command.
The server pauses, starts rattling the drives and flashing the leds, and then the lights dim and brighten and the UPS (for the Unix database servers) goes click-clack as it switches on and off. A power sag.
And the Netware server stops doing anything - no disk activity, no console activity, no nothing. After a suitable period of time, A reboots the server - no boot. A quick check indicates that the disks are hopelessly corrupt. So…
Reinstall the OS. Frantically try to find the Backup software disk. Install the Backup software. Try to find the Tape unit drivers. Install them. Find the Backup documentation to figure out how to do a restore. No docs. Wing it. Start the restore. Figure out that the backup software is installed in the wrong place. Rinse disks.
Repeat with backup software in the right place. Took all weekend, as in 48 hours on site.
Then the customer accused A of screwing up the job and refused to pay. Fortunately the Unix server logs showed the UPS activity at the critical time, and the customer backed off, payed up and took future business elsewhere. We did not miss them, and felt sorry for the new provider.
