Present Perfect

I finally got back a replacement SCSI drive for the external RAID system we have. Can you believe that ? Two full months. I've had the RAID shut off for most of it. Honestly, what's the point in having a RAID if you can't replace bad disks fast enough ?

In any case, as soon as I got it back, I stuck it in the free slot and turned on the machine. Then the beeping started again. I shut off the alarm in the card's bios then tried to rebuild the disk(1) array. It started doing so, then stopped at 0% and went off beeping again. Sigh.

What's a responsible sysadmin to do in a case like that ? Not tell his boss and spend the rest of his day challenging fate and defying odds, that's what. You know, sometimes computers really are more a case of black art and intuition than anything even closely resembling engineering practices or science.

As luck would have it, I happened to have an external enclosure with *FOUR* disk slots, and I use only three of them. So I still had the top slot free. Being in a really illogical state, ready to try anything, I decided to stick the drive in the top slot instead of the bottom one.

Hm, it didn't fit. Strange. Try an empty disk holder, that works. Try with the drive again, still doesn't work. Ok, try to take a drive out of slot 2 and stick that in slot 1. That works. Hm, strange. Take out drive 1 from slot 2 again, insert new drive in slot 1, doesn't work. Spend about twenty minutes physically comparing both the disk drive and the disk holders. They look identical. Mount new drive in holder 1 from slot 2 and try in slot 1. Doesn't work. Drive 1 in holder 3 from slot 4 works though. This isn't making sense at all. Especially since I can really feel that with the new drive, it slides in all the way except for the last bit and the latch at the front of the disk array that needs to go in a clamp-style thingy can't reach it.

Re-swap drives and holders, jiggle the SCSI connectors a bit since they look rather wobbly (don't try this at home), and try again. Now it slides in and it works. Anyone care to explain ? ;)

So, back to BIOS, turn off beeping again, ask for a rebuild, and after five very long minutes the 0% counter reaches 1%. Now I just have to hope that by the time it is rebuilt, the array will have been smart enough to do everything RAID is supposed to do ... and THEN I can tell my boss what happened, and assure him that everything's fixed. Phew ...

(1) Can anyone tell me why we use "disk" for hard drives and floppy disks but "disc" for cd-rom's, dvd's, cd-rw's and frisbees ?

I finally got back a replacement SCSI drive for the external RAID system we have. Can you believe that ? Two full months. I've had the RAID shut off for...