Went on a road trip this week to several of our remote offices. In one office, there is a 4 year old Compaq server that had a lot of dust on the outside (probably due to the fact that this server was in a closet with the A/C system!). I did the usual routine maintenance, check backups, disk space, temp files, error messages, power etc....there was an old SCSI tape drive on the server for backups .....which no one changed the nightly tapes......so I decided to remove the tape drive and install a USB external removable hard drive (Dell RD-1000). I waited until everyone left for the day and I took down the server. I removed the side panel and removed the SCSI card and the SCSI tape drive. Since the inside was dusty, I took a vacuum cleaner with a hose and sucked out all the dust. The server had 4 hot swap SCSI drives which I also cleaned. I put everything back together and fired the unit up thinking it was time to go to the hotel.......when the BIOS started, I got an error message about no SCSI boot device......not good! So I turned the unit off and reseated the SCSI card....still an error.....I then re-seated the SCSI cable.....no joy.....then I started getting an error about 2 disk drives failed!!!! Not good since there are only 4 drives in a RAID-5......starting to get concerned about losing all the data....backups?? Not what I wanted to do the rest of the night! So finally I re-seat the hard drives and the SCSI card plus the cables......still no luck! My last attempt was to check the SCSI back-plane, cable and power. Since the hard drives did not seem to be spinning up properly and making weird noises, I thought it might be the SCSI back-plane or power. When I re-seated all those items, the server booted with no issues or lost data!!! What a relief!!
So the moral of the story is....... if you are working on an old server that is dusty......the dust might be what is holding the unit together!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment