Mechanical Hard Disk Failure? Simple tip to allow you to backup your data.

Last week I got an alarming error on my Windows 7 work laptop:

     Windows detected a hard disk problem

I clicked the Show Details button to see which disk is failing.

My C: drive was failing and I had Symantec whole disk encryption installed - a complication which makes data recovery a little more precarious!

The first time it appeared I hit the Ask me again later button and then started to make space for an emergency backup of my important data on to my second D: drive, which I have installed in a caddy where the DVD drive goes. I also used a USB hard drive for additional storage later.

I had about 56Gb of data to copy, so I made a start.  My C: drive allowed me to backup about 6Gb of my important data before the drive failed and crashed my laptop.  While my data was copying I opened MSCONFIG.EXE and chose the "Selective startup" option to speed up subsequent boot up times.

So I restarted the laptop and recommenced the data copying. About 15 minutes later the disk failed again. I went through this cycle a few more times but I wasn't making much headway with my backup, and I was worried about the larger files I needed to copy.

I realised I was going to need a copy utility that was able to only copy incomplete or missing files to the target drive. But I also knew that 15 mins wouldn't be long enough to get the backup done.

I had a dim recollection about putting a failed hard drive in the freezer as a way of resuscitating it. I didn't have much to lose at this point, so I wrapped my old  C drive in an anti-stat bag, popped it in the freezer, and went to bed.

In the morning I retrieved the frozen drive and popped it back into my laptop. The laptop booted fine so I opened up Microsoft SyncToy, which I already had installed in any case.

I created a sync job for My Documents folder, using the Echo option, but I also went into Change options and selected Check for contents (and unchecked Save overwritten files in the Recycle Bin to make it a little quicker). This option will check the file size is correct if your file copy does get interrupted part way through.

I ran the sync job and copied data happily for over 35 minutes before the drive failed again.

The cold had definitely helped, so to improve my "up time" I placed a freezer block on top and below where the hard drive was located (see picture).  I found that by cycling fresh freezer blocks every 20 minutes or so my up time was almost unlimited and allowed me to copy off all the data I needed to retrieve!

It has to be said that this method will only be effective when your hard drive is suffering a mechanical failure. If you simply have a data corruption it will have no benefit I'm afraid.

Good luck.

SCOM 2007 R2 Web Console install fails

Having trouble installing the Web Console on SCOM 2007 R2? Does setup report that the install has been interrupted?

Make sure the IIS Admin service is running - Web Console install fails if it is not.

I also noticed that if you have uninstalled SCOM (and the Web Console), the related Web Console web site and app pool does not get removed from IIS - this might also cause issues when reinstalling the Web Console on the same server.

UPDATE: SCOM 2007 R2 Reporting/Data Warehouse install issues

Below is a link to an article which describes the SQL instance underscore issue in relation to System Centre Essentials 2010:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc308579.aspx

It appears Microsoft have only just realised it applies to SCOM 2007 R2 also (not that the article above says that though).

SCOM 2007 R2 Reporting/Data Warehouse install issues

First off - the SCOM installation process has a lot of prerequisites which must be done in advance (obviously!) - make sure you have followed the Microsoft deployment docs in their entirety before starting the SCOM install. The following documents a couple of issues which caused significant delays in completing the installation of SCOM 2007 R2 - I hope my loss can be your gain.

If you are using named instances in SQL Server 2008 SP1, you cannot use underscores in the instance name - this nugget of information was provided by Microsoft Product Support.

The problem is observed during the install of the Data Warehouse database component when setup reports the following:

"The setup wizard was interrupted before Operations Manager 2007 R2 could be installed"

Then you will see:

"The setup failed. Do you want to open the setup log file (search for "value 3" in the file for locating failure)"

In the setup log file you may see references to "invalid namespace".

You need to uninstall the named SQL instance with an underscore in the name, and install a new instance with no underscores. However, you could simply install a 2nd instance with no underscores in the name and retain the original instance, if being used for other databases. Depending on your MS license model you may be allowed to run any number of instances on the one license (but check with your MS sales rep).

Note1: If you use the default SQL instance you will not see these issues.

Note2: I have seen this issue with SQL Server 2008 SP1 Standard Edition but I do not know if the problem exists in other versions of SQL Server 2008.

If you are using domain accounts for the SCOM services, there is a limit on the length of the service account names. If your service account names are very long they cause the installation of SCOM 2007 R2 Reporting to fail. After I entered the Data Warehouse Write Action account details - setup reported that it was not able to validate the supplied credentials.

My original service account was 25 characters in length (I like descriptive names, ok?) - my amended service account was 14 characters in length and this worked fine.

This SCOM infrastructure configuration contained a single OpsMgr server (hosting all roles) and a single SQL Server 2008 SP1 Standard Edition database server (with a named instance) hosting the OperationsManager database, OperationsManagerDW database, and the SQL Server Reporting services components. This is for a small site with approximately 100 Windows servers.