Thanks God for backup!

I survived a hard drive crash with no data loss and no time spent for installs! Kudos to the Microsoft Server Backup / PC System Repair team!

Two days ago the SCSI hard drive in my Win 2008 home server (Domain Controller, DNS, web, etc) died on me . It was an 80GB Cheetah from another era (or should I say Dinosaur), and it probably it was its time… I had back-ups of important personal user files from other computers (so I was not yet puling my hair), but even those could not be accessed. See, the Linux NAS used for storage refused to give access to the shares without a domain controller to authenticate the logon requests…

I was already seeing myself spending a week reinstalling and reconfiguring the server, and my heart was full of joy at this idea. Not! Fortunately, it intrigued me why I kept installed on the machine another 300GB old drive, and when I checked I discovered it contained a full system backup VHD image from the same day! I had completely forgot about it. I didn’t even remember when I had the moment of lucidity to set up automatic daily backups, but boy, am I ever glad I did!

I bought another hard drive, I used a Windows Vista (!) installation disk as I couldn’t find the one from Win2008 (it worked fine, btw), and 30 minutes later my server was up and running, with no data loss. SCSCI –> SATA, 80GB –> 1TB unformatted, unmatched restore tools, all these were no problems for System Repair. Yay system restore!

Now I can focus on the second crashed machine, where the power supply crashed and burned (literally) and unfortunately it took with it at least the motherboard… Or maybe it was the other way around, who knows. But fixing it will be the fun for another night.