Diary of a Network Geek

No, this is not one of my infamous religious posts.
Actually, this is a technical post. Thursday this past week started like any other. “Jim, do this, ” and “Jim, I need that” and “Hey, Jim, should this computer be smoking this way?” A standard day in the life of a stand-alone IT department. Then, things turned ugly. Every call became “Hey, Jim, is there something wrong with this network share?” And, I finally put two and two together to get five and, sadly, discovered that the Linksys EFG-120 Network Attached Storage device had curled up its toes and died.
Luckily, the important stuff is all backed up, but not everything on that drive is “important” enough to hit the limited backup we have. So, it was time for the Network Geek to go into action. I started, as always, with a reboot. Nada. Well, I thought the NAS was Windoze based, since it was a mapped drive on the crusty, old Windows NT server I’ve been limping along here, so I reboot it again. Still nothing. So, thinking at a moderate pace, I decided to try and reseat the drive in the device. One small problem: the NAS is locked and no one has a key. Luckily, a little thing like a locked door has never been more than a temporary impediment to me, so I start banging away at the lock with my LEATHERMAN Pocket Survival Tool. After a few minutes, I managed to bust the drivetray out of its slot without damaging the case and reseat the drive. Crank it up and… Still nada. Damn, I thought to myself. Gonna’ be one of those days.
So, I tell the Boss about it. Boss says, do what you can and let me know. Great. I try getting the drive into an external drive case and hooking it up to his firewire hub on his Mac. Can you guess what we got? Yeah, nada. Right, well, I’m not ready to give up because, well, I’m a tad obsessive about this kind of thing. Sure, that makes me a little hard to deal with in the World, but in my job, obsession is definately a trait to be desired.
Next, I try hooking it up to my machine and seeing if Windows 2000 can see the partition and fix what’s wrong. What’d I get? Nunca nada. Not done, yet, though. I dig out a copy of PartitionMagic. I make the disks and boot into that freaky, specialized operating environment to see if I could fix the broken disk partition. See, I’m figuring that it’s just the File Allocation Table that’s decided to take a vacation. PartitionMagic is totally scoop at restoring those kinds of things, which is why I gave it a whirl. Sadly, nada. Well, not quite nada, since I was at least able to see that the damaged partition seemed to be a Linux partition of some kind. AhHa!
So, now, I install the drive into a Linux machine I keep under my desk, just in case of emergencies. I duck in and tell the Boss what I have in mind. He gives me a funny look and says,”Well, that’s a bit of a Hail Mary, isn’t it?” Well, yeah, it was, but isn’t that what I get paid for? To come up with and implement “Hail Marys”? And, if it works, who cares what crazy thing I have to do? Anyway, after the update to the Boss, it was off to the Linux machine to attempt a partition recovery, the hard way. Whoops! I had forgotten I canablized the drive in that machine to fix another problem weeks ago! Damn. So, I install Ubuntu on it, mainly because I have the ISO downloaded and can quickly burn an install CD. Well, Ubuntu goes to the Internet to find an archive server to download the install files, so that takes all night. Still, I figured, I’d come in early and bang this out in no time. Well, my head-shrink says I live in fantasy too much, so, it shouldn’t surprise my readers to know that it was far from easy. For an hour Friday morning, I ran every disk repair or recovery program I could find that came with a standard install of Linux. Guess what I got? Yeah, bubkes. (That’s Yiddish for nada.)
So, after all that, I still ended up formatting the drive and letting the restore run. Oh, did I mention that it was a Maxtor? For you non-geeks reading this, Maxtor 80 Gig drives have the highest fail-rate I’ve ever seen in the field. Everyone has problems with them. Well, this was a Maxtor 120 Gig drive, but I’m afraid that the same luck holds true to them, too.
Hmm, sounds like it’s time to order that new server I’ve been asking for, doesn’t it?

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."
   --Ralph Waldo Emerson