One of these things is not like the other
Jan. 9th, 2019 01:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
plonqCall it a brain fart, or a senior moment, but I had a minor moment of derp today.
In the aftermath of a significant power outage this morning (and by significant I mean the area it affected more than the time it was out), I started making my way through the house, resetting clocks and setting things back to normalcy.
One of the last things I tackled was the file server in the basement. It's going to need some attention soon because its fans are starting to make alarming sounds when the system first powers up. Once it has reached its operating temperature, it settles into a routine squeak and squeal, but for the first while it's quite a cacophony of disturbing noises. After the scare with the RAID on my main machine the other day, I thought it would not be a bad thing to check on the health of the RAID on our file server, since that is our main backup for everything.
I called up Disk Management in Windows, and was alarmed by what I saw. Below is the results from our file server, juxtaposed above the results from my machine upstairs.
One of these things is not like the other.
The moment I saw it showing as one drive reading as a single, basic partition, my inner alarm bells starting ringing furiously.
OMG! How long has the second drive been dead? Why have I never noticed any errors messages during boot-up?
I booted into the UEFI and things got even more confusing. I just could not resolve the drives it showed to the drives that I knew were in the computer. When I rebooted again to watch the statuses flash past, I noticed that it offered a options for interrupting the boot sequence to change settings.
And then I applied a mental palm to my face. The reason Windows was not seeing the RAID was because I was handling it in hardware; I'd installed a card for it when I built this backup machine because I didn't want to entrust our data to sometimes-flaky software RAID.
To my defence, it has been a few years since I built this machine.
In the aftermath of a significant power outage this morning (and by significant I mean the area it affected more than the time it was out), I started making my way through the house, resetting clocks and setting things back to normalcy.
One of the last things I tackled was the file server in the basement. It's going to need some attention soon because its fans are starting to make alarming sounds when the system first powers up. Once it has reached its operating temperature, it settles into a routine squeak and squeal, but for the first while it's quite a cacophony of disturbing noises. After the scare with the RAID on my main machine the other day, I thought it would not be a bad thing to check on the health of the RAID on our file server, since that is our main backup for everything.
I called up Disk Management in Windows, and was alarmed by what I saw. Below is the results from our file server, juxtaposed above the results from my machine upstairs.
One of these things is not like the other.
The moment I saw it showing as one drive reading as a single, basic partition, my inner alarm bells starting ringing furiously.
OMG! How long has the second drive been dead? Why have I never noticed any errors messages during boot-up?
I booted into the UEFI and things got even more confusing. I just could not resolve the drives it showed to the drives that I knew were in the computer. When I rebooted again to watch the statuses flash past, I noticed that it offered a options for interrupting the boot sequence to change settings.
And then I applied a mental palm to my face. The reason Windows was not seeing the RAID was because I was handling it in hardware; I'd installed a card for it when I built this backup machine because I didn't want to entrust our data to sometimes-flaky software RAID.
To my defence, it has been a few years since I built this machine.
