Disk failure
One thing to be done today was another attempt to repair the Windows installation, but there must have been something very wrong, because it seemed to take hours. So I aborted the installation, accepting I would have to reinstall all software.
Starting with Office 2007 – but that failed for some reason.
One other thing I would do is install more memory. The shop offered me a 2Gb DDR-2 DIMM, but the system cannot handle this type of DIMMs – the notch is on a different location so the DIMM didn’t fit.
When I next tried to reboot the system, the first disk was gone in BIOS….
It appears to spin so that is not an issue. I checked power and SAS cable, switched with the other drive, but that didn’t work either. So probably there is something wrong with the electronics on the disk….
A colleague has the ability to try to restore data from broken disks, in some extent. And since there is some data on that disk that is not copied to another location, it’s worth to try to get it off the drive. Otherwise, it’s lost. Pity, but not fatal.
What goes on behind the doors of the (private) data center