I’ve been having a lot of “fun” in the past few weeks with cloning a hard drive on a server. Let me tell you up front that I am a major penny pincher. You might remember my series on simple ways for the church to save money on operational expenditures. Some say that I’m cheap, but I prefer to be considered committed to missions and wise spending. That’s who I am. So, I end up using a lot of open source software.

I love Clonezilla. It’s an open source title comparable to Norton Ghost. Clonezilla has done some excellent things for me on a number of machines. It can really save a ton of time deploying new machines or replacing failing hard drives. Well, for some reason, it wouldn’t clone one of the partitions on Caleb’s hard drive. I did everything I knew how to do to make it work. I fixed the bad sectors, I ran tons of maintenance utilities, and I even got into the inner workings of Clonezilla and changed some of the script settings (scary, yes!).

Tonight, I bit the bullet and bought Paragon’s Drive Copy 8.5 Professional. It’s actually running right now, so I don’t have the final results, but it’s past the point that Clonezilla always crapped out. I’ve got to tell you that it looks like it’s going to be worth every penny of it’s $129 price tag. I have been pulling my hair out for weeks with this problem, and this thing looks like it’s going to do the trick. (I’ll know for sure in half an hour.)

What got me writing early on this, other than having nothing else to do but watch a progress bar, is that the rescue CD is very user friendly. It doesn’t look thrown together like so many other Linux-type rescue CD’s. It properly recognized the RAID, named the drives in easy human readable format (making it real hard to mess up the source and destination), and even lets me use the mouse. If this works, I don’t know if I’ll even install the Windows software that came with it.

So, hopefully my adventure with the Attack of the Clones is coming to an end. I’ll let you know how this thing pans out.

* UPDATE *

Drive Copy 8.5 worked like a champ!  The single drive has been successfully cloned to the RAID.  Now I’m a definite fan of Paragon Software!

Caleb is one of our servers (and just for added clarification - server in this instance means a computer, not a waiter).  Sometimes I love Caleb.  He works hard and fast.  He typically does everything that I ask of him.  He’s a super-server in so many situations.  But, like any toddler, sometimes he throws temper tantrums.  This week he started routing users’ e-mails into never never land, and if you put your ear up to his hard drive, you could almost hear him laughing.

I have to choose my punishments wisely for Caleb, since punishing him also punishes all my users.  I typically don’t put him in time-out, though I’d like to.  I do, however, verbally threaten him.  I’ll say things to him like, “You better act right mister, or I’m installing Linux on you,” or “I’m going to block your favorite sites.”  These threats usually don’t work too well for him.

In this last string of issues with Caleb, namely the development of bad sectors on his drive, I’ve found the need to clone his disk and move on.  Apparently he’s rather attached to this drive and doesn’t want a new one because every time I try to clone it, the process fails.  So, I’ve used every tool that I know of to fix the bad sectors to let the cloning commence, and I’m at a dead end right now.  I’ve used chkdsk, Seagate tools, and today I even purchased Spin Rite for the job.  All to no avail.

So, if anyone has good punishment ideas for Caleb, please let me know.  Or, if you know how to get drives with bad sectors cloned, that’d be good to know too.

My mom used to say, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”  So, for my post about ACS yesterday, I feel the need to say that I flippin’ love ACS.

And now to the post…

A couple of weeks ago, I replaced the hard drive in one of our servers.  Well, we’ve had the joy this week of finding that the new hard drive has bad sectors.  Hooray.  So, tomorrow I’m taking the opportunity to switch over to a RAID 1 on that server with two new drives.  Still using 7200 drives though, not moving up to 10,000’s yet.  I’ll make sure to keep you updated.

Over the weekend, I did some maintenance on one of our servers. There were a few discoveries, and I have to admit that I am disappointed in myself for not discovering these things until now.

Over the past few weeks, I was hearing the tell-tale signs of a failing hard drive with the funny clicks and such. Running check disk confirmed there was a problem. I wasn’t too worried about the immediacy of the problem because I had been told by our previous contractor that the drives were mirrored and that the backup solution would work. Also, I had a replacement drive ready to be deployed.

I set up my schedule to be on site last Saturday (the 12th) to work on the server. It wasn’t long before I figured out that the drives weren’t mirrored at all, and in fact the supposed mirrored drive wasn’t even connected to power. I booted from that drive and discovered that it hadn’t been in use since 9/2006.

The backup system we are using is a $2,200 solution provided by our previous contractor that is a linear array of 4 500GB HDDs. (Ironically, also purchased in 9/2006) Each night, the server sends an image of it’s hard drives to the array located on the other side of a fire wall way on the other side of our building. Recovery is done by booting the server from a Linux restore disk. The disk failed to connect to the backup server using all methods I tried, but I verified that communication existed between the two. I found no helpful information about the specific error message on the 241 page manual, on Intel’s FAQs, or on Google. I will be contacting our previous contractor about this and also pursuing the Intel support department as to why we were unable to restore a backup.

In the end I used a tool to clone the existing drive to the new hard drive. It was done within 20 minutes. I then had to wrestle to get the drive letters back to the original assignments (and this took a lot of work for me). In the end, it was as simple as booting from a Windows 98 boot disk and running FDISK /MBR.

The moral of the story is to check and recheck your backup strategy to make sure you’re not left stranded.  If the disk had actually failed, I would have been in a world of hurt and the church would have been forced to fork out a lot of money to fix the problem.  So, I’m a dope, but I learned an invaluable lesson from this adventure.

I have never seen so many red X’s on an Event Viewer as I have recently on our main production server.  Looks like I’m going to have some fun times ahead.  I bet it’s a failing HDD.

Right now, our main backup solution isn’t able to create a reliable image of the drive.  We’re also having a number of services fail that don’t normally.  This server is utilizing a mirrored drive.

So, I hope it keeps on keeping on until the weekend so that I can take it offline with little impact.