NSS Corrupt Volume

[cjsj1]

Evening All

I had learnt from previous experience not to span volumes onto more disks as I lost 50% of my data due to old backups (also rectified). So I built myself a new 6.5 SP4 server and mirrored my data drive. All is well there at the moment all my data is safe even after the following happened.

Then I had a power supply problem with the new server and found that the sys drive had sustained a problem, NW couldn’t find the sys volume, some segments are missing. The sys drive is 1 HD. I thought that since I had NSS then I had a Farley good chance of recovering the volume and any data on it.

But no NSS cant see the Sys volume and low and behold I missed the email system had installed itself on the sys volume and also all the emails so at the moment I have lost a lot of email at the mo.

Does anybody know of anyway way that can help me maybe get NSS to see the sys volume? I have tried the NSS /forceactivate=sys but it says it can’t find it. The _admin is loading ok.


Regards

 

[marvhuffaker]

NSS tools will only help you with a volume that exists. If you can't even locate the volume, that's a completely different problem. Have you verfied that the drivers are loaded and that the storage device is even visible to the system?

Marvin Huffaker, MCNE

http://www.redjuju.com

 

[cjsj1]

Yes the drive is visible and it will load ok till Novell loads the NSS stuff which it does. Then it will say cannot mount volume sys, one or more segments cannot be located. I have ghosted the drive to another one but it looks like the drive sustained damage as ghost says that there are unreadable clusters but I tell it to copy them anyway. And it boots to the same point as before.

 

[marvhuffaker]

is your sys volume on the same drive as the bootup partition? Only one drive in the server? No raid?

What's the configuraiton.



Marvin Huffaker, MCNE

http://www.redjuju.com

 

[cjsj1]

Yes the sys and boot are the same drive and no raid just a single drive.

It boots fine and the _admin pool is active but just can’t find some segments of the sys volume, somehow I have the feeling that I am not going to be able to recover any files on this drive.

 

[marvhuffaker]

it "IS" possible that the driver for the device is not loading... That would cause the system to not see the netware partitions. make sure the HAM driver is loaded for whatever type of controller you have. that's your first step.

Marvin Huffaker, MCNE

http://www.redjuju.com

 

[cjsj1]

Thanks for the replies.

I think now after the Ghost software can’t read some sectors as they are bad that the drive is damaged and that is why the sys partition is not loading.

I have now reinstalled a fresh install of 6.5 and have managed to find a lonely copy of my post office which is a month old so not too much lost. I have also mirrored the sys drive now so I hopefully won’t get this type of trauma again.

Thanks for your help Marvin; I will keep the drive just in case one day I can afford to recover the data and the email hole which this has left me. just got to reinstall all the apps and reconfigure everything again but its useful experiance anyway.

Anyway thanks again.

 

[marvhuffaker]

For your future reference, when you install groupwise, it wants to default to Z:\ which is usually SYSUBLIC unless you've changed the mapping. You need to make sure that you change the install location to a different volume for best results.

Marvin Huffaker, MCNE

http://www.redjuju.com