Kristen had an upsetting moment when she plugged in the XD card from the camera and saw the following
It looked like all the photos that she had taken today were corrupt and unreadable (and translated into chinese!). Fortunately I remembered reading about PC Inspector File recovery which I had tried out but not in a real life scenario. One download later and a search of the hard drive returned lots of image files stored on the disk (as expected). Recovering them was just a matter of selecting whereabouts I wanted to put the files (on a different disk). There were two options available. The first was using FAT1 and the second was to use FAT2. When I used FAT1 most of the files came back ok, but there were several files that came back slightly corrupted – this one is one of the worst
Some of the other photos have been uploaded to my Birdtable zoto gallery as Kristen took some excellent pictures of the birds on the birdtable today.
This USB2 to IDE cable converter looks like a great idea for disaster recovery/portable backup. This saves having to purchase disk caddys or boxes for drives – the one that I purchased was for laptop drives at about $40 retail (I paid $20 2nd hand only to find that the 2.5″ disk is slightly to big to fit in the case). The other advantage is that you can also attach items such as dvd drives etc.
Thanks to Kevin Devin for the link
Koozie points to a Software review on 3 linux system rescue cds. Looks like the System Rescue CD will be a good addition to the recovery cds that I already have.
I’ve been running an ASR recovery on a windows2k3 server running in virtualpc today. Restoring off a backup file image on a virtual disk and a captured virtual disk, it has taken about 5 hours to restore the 1.6GB of data to the machine (and has 10 minutes left) – VirtualPC is great for doing whatif tests but not if it takes this long to do anything!
In another DR situation coming up shortly, we are going to restore a w2k3 server with exchange2k3 on it. I’ve done it (for real) on exchange2000 and it wasn’t a pleasant experience but hopefully e2k3 has improved the methods used to do a recovery. Checking in technet I found a good page which has multimedia presentations on how to do various exchange2003 recovery procedures. Hopefully I can find this content on my technet cd’s so I don’t have to download it off the internet but again, useful training to do before the event.
Now that we had proved (or thought we had) that the DR recovery onto new hardware for our Symantec Enterprise Firewall worked it was time to upgrade to version 8 of the software.
The server that I had to do a full restore on yesterday was scary…After it was plugged back in the domain it would not allow clients to authenticate. I suspected that this was due to the fact that it was restored from a tape over 2 weeks old and therefore the SAM on this server was out of date with the SAM on the PDC. Trying to use netdom (the one from supplement 4 to the resource kit) kept on coming up with access denied errors and was therefore not much use. Overnight I scheduled a reboot of the pdc and did nothing else to the BDC as I was going to attempt a fix this morning…however when I got there, the users were working away – I guess the reboot had synched everything up properly (thankfully)
Yesterday I started on an inhouse, inplace upgrade of a nt4sp6 machine to Windows 2000. Fortunately I took a backup with PowerQuest DriveImage of the machine before I started. Ghost is normally our imager of choice but the version of Ghost we have would not see the SCSI disks yet DI would.
The power company tells you that you are using too much power.
When I first heard about the Power failures hit US and Canada it was mentioned on WorldNewYork who was rather cryptic about his reasons for not having power and my first thought was that there had been another sept 11 type of bombing! It was quite a relief (to me sitting thousands of miles away!) that this wasn’t the case and it was *only* a power cut – but what a power cut. Apparently the biggest in the history of the states and affecting more than 50 million people.
Being the computer tech, I’d just love to know how all the Disaster Recovery companies coped with everyone calling them to get their servers online QUICK. I know of at least two bloggers who are probably affected, or at least their blogs are down right now – (not including WorldNewYork who used a dialupmodem, torch and laptop to post! His pictures really are worth looking at too.)
There are also some good photos taken by phone at blackout.textamerica.com with some pretty funny comments with them too.