Power Outage

A couple of weekends ago, after a day trip with the family, we came home to a dark house after a strong storm. The electricity came back a couple hours later, so I started bringing up the servers. Unfortunately, the file server wasn't cooperating.

I've written before that this server will not hold the BIOS settings through a power off - despite changing the battery. Since it can likely be fixed only by replacing the motherboard, I've decided to live with it. Unfortunately, when I brought the box up, I forgot to reset the clock back to the current, so Linux decided to force a disk check. After about 25%, it froze. I gave it half an hour before giving up and bouncing the box.

After that, when it rebooted, it couldn't find a boot disk. Arrgh!

It was a week before I came back to it.

Since it still wasn't booting, I decided to reinstall grub as I have done several times before on different machines.

sudo grub
find /boot/grub/stage1 (this will return the drive name - mine is hd0,1)
root (hd?,?) (use the drive name returned in the previous step)
setup (hd0)
quit

Surprisingly, this worked! I'm back in business.

A side note, during my down week, I found the need to recover several files from the backup server, and I'm happy to report that all were successful. It's nice to know that the restore works not only in a test, but also when it is actually needed.

Now, here's the rub. When I thought the hard drive was toast and I was going to be tasked with recovering the entire thing, I looked through the BackupPC documentation and many Google searches, but I found no examples of someone who has done that. I'm tempted to setup a test box, back it up, and then try to recover it just to see if I can. Should be a fun weekend project.