A wee bit about my computer nightmare

LeMarque

LeMarque

New member
So, I have a line running from my house, where the DSL comes in, to my man cave, approx. 100 feet away. A few weeks ago, lightening struck this line and, among other things, blew my beloved HP XW4600 away.



I went online to eBay and found a 'Trusted Seller', fairly reputable really, that happened to have an HP bare bones case just like mine. Since I had/have a SAS controller and 15K drives in the machine, I thought I'd save myself some cash and just swap the guts of my workstation into a new box.



I get the case, swap my cards, drives, etc. and boot up. I turned away for a sec, can't remember why, and when I looked back, the screen says something to the effect that the wipe disk operation is complete!



Some half witted tech left a CD in the drive, and the BIOS was set to boot from the CD, that this 'Trusted Reseller' uses to wipe drives of any sensitive data.



Years of data and programs gone in a flash. There's more, but we all have better things to do so I'll forgo the rest of the gory details.



Now I appreciate the fact that you can't buy a gun without waiting two weeks.
 
If it was a simple single pass wipe, you should be able to recover most of your files.



I can't stress how important it is to have offsite backups.
 
Dan said:
If it was a simple single pass wipe, you should be able to recover most of your files.



I can't stress how important it is to have offsite backups.
Click to expand...



:werd:



And you have 15K SAS drives, but no RAID array? Or are you saying it wiped the array?
 
Depending on the level of the wipe,

Easeus Data Recovery may help you get back your data.

Easeus recently recovered 90% of the files on an accidentally formatted partition. The literature suggests it might work with Raid configurations also.
 
Thanks for the replies.



They refunded all costs including shipping.



No Raid and even if it was it would have wiped both drives. SAS 'cause I'm a speed freak and you should see how fast Photoshop opens :)



I use these developers Data Recovery - Data Recovery Software - RAID Recovery - NAS Data Recovery But I do regular backups to an external drive. But restoring all the Adobe, Office, my utils, etc .. OMG



So to add insult to injury, I buy an HP Z210 Workstation; only to find out it doesn't support SAS! But I got it to work anyway. Companies are dumbing down pro machines just to make an extra .25 cents.



Plan on giving the Z210 to my wife at some point and getting the 400 series. But at least I'm up and running.
 
Yep spinning platters are for fools :D SSD is amazing, and cheap now. My $0.02 as someone in the "industry":



-Get a smaller SSD for your OS and frequently used apps - 60 gigs is plenty for most

-Get a larger drive for all your other garbage



Then frequently Ghost (or whatever your fav imaging program is) the SSD over to the larger drive. Keep multiple revisions of the SSD. Backup the larger drive to an offsite storage location. Many solutions are $50 for a year for unilmited storage... DO NOT KEEP BACKUPS AT YOUR HOUSE!!!!
 
Dan said:
Yep spinning platters are for fools :D SSD is amazing, and cheap now. My $0.02 as someone in the "industry":
Click to expand...



I've been called worse ;) 'splain 'industry'. I used to be a Reseller for HP business products.



-Get a smaller SSD for your OS and frequently used apps - 60 gigs is plenty for most

-Get a larger drive for all your other garbage



Dan said:
Then frequently Ghost (or whatever your fav imaging program is) the SSD over to the larger drive. Keep multiple revisions of the SSD. Backup the larger drive to an offsite storage location. Many solutions are $50 for a year for unilmited storage... DO NOT KEEP BACKUPS AT YOUR HOUSE!!!!
Click to expand...



Dislike all Norton products. Thinking of NovaStor.
 
I'm a software engineer with strong ties to hardware. If you don't like norton, there are plenty of free alternative, ie clonezilla. Reason I mention ghost is because almost everyone has a copy of it somewhere, seems to get bundled with lots of stuff.
 
Dan said:
I'm a software engineer with strong ties to hardware. If you don't like norton, there are plenty of free alternative, ie clonezilla. Reason I mention ghost is because almost everyone has a copy of it somewhere, seems to get bundled with lots of stuff.
Click to expand...



Tag, You're It!



Now I know who to contact when I have issues with Joomla! :woot:
 
Ha...with the meter running, I'd be glad to help with Joomla, but seriously I'm more into application integration and hardware integration, think telephony systems, messaging, etc.
 
Dan said:
I'm a software engineer with strong ties to hardware. If you don't like norton, there are plenty of free alternative, ie clonezilla. Reason I mention ghost is because almost everyone has a copy of it somewhere, seems to get bundled with lots of stuff.
Click to expand...



I suppose you'd probably gag if I mention that I use Acronis TrueImage?
 
C. Charles Hahn said:
I suppose you'd probably gag if I mention that I use Acronis TrueImage?
Click to expand...



Nah, not at all. Just happy you are imaging your drive. Do you have split partitions for your os/apps/data?
 
Dan said:
Yep spinning platters are for fools :D SSD is amazing, and cheap now. My $0.02 as someone in the "industry":



-Get a smaller SSD for your OS and frequently used apps - 60 gigs is plenty for most

-Get a larger drive for all your other garbage



Then frequently Ghost (or whatever your fav imaging program is) the SSD over to the larger drive. Keep multiple revisions of the SSD. Backup the larger drive to an offsite storage location. Many solutions are $50 for a year for unilmited storage... DO NOT KEEP BACKUPS AT YOUR HOUSE!!!!
Click to expand...



and SSDs are not the most mature yet either, better but not 100% reliable though.
 
Damn Dirty Ape said:
and SSDs are not the most mature yet either, better but not 100% reliable though.
Click to expand...



I guess it all depends on how much you spend. We're quickly moving to all SSD storage at work, and we'd be hearing it from the rack monkeys if there were excessive failures. Its not a new technology at all either, just new to consumers.
 
Dan said:
I guess it all depends on how much you spend. We're quickly moving to all SSD storage at work, and we'd be hearing it from the rack monkeys if there were excessive failures. Its not a new technology at all either, just new to consumers.
Click to expand...



:werd: I used to be one of those "rack monkeys" -- the datacenter I worked for started using SSDs a while ago, and now has an entire cloud hosting platform based on SSDs. They're getting throughput of 475,000 IOPS out of it, which is way above and beyond anything you'd see with platter drives.
 
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