Hard disk problems! Help please!

[ScottSN]

I have a Novell SBS 5.1 server that cannot mount the SYS volume and is exhibiting physical drive problems. (SCSI Cheetah 18GB on Dell PowerEdge 2400 Single Disk, NO RAID).
This morning, the client was getting license manager errors and couldn't mount SYS partition upon reboot.
I ran Dell firmware drive diagnostics, which it passed, up until running extended read tests (entire drive). Bad sectors.
Does anyone have any ideas on transferring data to a known good drive so that I can try to salvage data without having to worry about the physical drive going south?
If this was a Windows system, I'd ghost the entire drive to a good drive, including bad sectors, create an image file (for rollback), and then try to salvage data off the good drive. Any suggestions for Netware?
Of course all this happened the day after I added 2 connection licenses, so, in the back of the client's mind, it has something to do with that. "It was fine until you did that license thing..."

 

[ScottSN]

Just an update:

I was able to recover all of the partitions to a replacement drive by using Storage Manager (Portlock Software).

I emailed Portlock to see if Storage Manager would be appropriate for my situation. Not only did they respond quickly, John Hanley personally walked me through recovering the data to the new drive.

I can't say enough about how great John was in helping me, not to mention how great a product Storage Manager is. I've used Server Magic and the original Ghost4Netware (which John wrote). Storage Manager is better than both of them rolled together. It allowed me to run the recovery from DOS, on a non-bootable Novell SBS 5.1 server.

After yesterday, I can't imagine working with Netware servers without having this software in my kit.

 

[TheLad]

I'd suggest getting some failover on your kit, whether it be mirroring disks (RAID 1) or RAID 5. Then if a disk fails, you just replace it. -----------------------------------------------------
"It's true, its damn true!"
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