Replacing the failed drive in QNAP

My QNAP storage got a failed drive (drive 1 to be specific). I pulled it out, inserted a new one and… nothing happened. On the web console it was showing RAID 5 Disk Volume with only drives 2, 3 and 4. The volume had “degraded” status and the Action button was greyed out. Here’s the solution:

SUN Chassis – Too many users are logged in

I’ve got an issue when I could not log into one of my SUN/Oralce chassis. The message was “Too many users are logged in“. If this message comes from any blade, the issue can be easily resolved by logging to chassis and resetting blade SP from chassis console. In this particular case the solution should be very similar – reset chassis SP. However, how to do this if not web console nor SSH allow to login?

Artifacts. Page 1

Have you ever seen it? 3.5″ Extra-High Density Floppy Disk, 4MB. If you remember, the most popular size has been 1.44 MB. 2.88 MB is also known, but 4 MB?

No, it is not a fake. It is one of many-many floppies, (more than 20), that were used to install software for Nortel Meridian PBX. Motorola and Mitsubishi were the only manufacturers for floppy drives  that were able to read these floppies. Same floppies were used to backup/restore the PBX configuration.

 

Do not go sleep

I needed to prevent a monitor from going sleep every 15 minutes. Our group policy prohibits any changes in power management on the computer, but does not configure any settings, keeping them at default values. So it looked like I would be able to make the changes, but not from Control Panel

STORAGE BAD on WD DX4000

One of our WD DX4000 died with a message “STARTUP FAILED 0xD9“. The recovery process from recovery DVD failed with the message “STORAGE BAD“. Even though there was no indication about failed drive(s), I could not  get further than “STORAGE BAD“.

Finally I fixed it. The problem was in a drive partitioning.

Hard Disk as a Grinder

Everybody has seen the internals of a hard drive. If you have not, here’s the picture from Wiki

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive_platter)

As you can see, the platter looks just like a mirror. Not always..

Recently I got a broken hard drive. A user complained that it produced the sound “like a grinder”. Well, actually it was…