| Shortly after I started my first consulting business back in 1998 one of our customers wanted us to upgrade their compaq server from one disk to a raid. We started Friday after normal working hour by checking that the backup worked (it did) then proceeded to upgrade the server with a raid backplane and three new scsi disk, installed Windows NT, installed the backup software and started a restore while getting some takeaway. The restore only took like 15 minutes - and to our horror we discovered that the previous IT admin had set it up to do an incremental backup on the same dat tape overwriting it every day! Ok, no worry, we had not used the old disk, so we installed it and turned on the computer.... Nothing happened.... Strange, we removed the raid backplane, installed everything as it had been... Still nothing. After 24+ hours working on the problem, including several hours talking to compaq support (best support ever!) we had to go home for some sleep. When I got back to the server room I fired up Norton Disk Editor and painfully figured out the MBR was all zeros on the disk, luckily the rest of the disk look like correct data! Several hours later, just before sunday turned to monday I finally got an MBR written using NDE and NDD, booting the system and seeing everything was all right. Monday we told the customer we had some problems and would do the upgrade another day (after we had taken multiple backups :) |