Major HD Crash

[LordArt]

As you might have noticed, the website has been down most of the week, and the forums for a few days more. If you want details, read below, but the short of it is, any user from the last backup (ie. end of october 05) is no longer in the database and needs to reenter their information and make sure any posts they made are still readable. Sorry for the inconvience.


Details:
As stated the HD with the OS crashed. I WAS able to swap daughter boards on the HD since I had two others with that same model and was able to retrieve the database files. The UNFORTUNATE part was, evidently it was writting to the user file at the time and corrupted that part of the database. I was able to salvage everything else is seems (so far it seems anyways).

New System:
Well, it's kinda an old system but new to me. The old system was a converted games machine (1800+ XP w/ SCSI). I've moved it to a donated dual 550 pentium server with a SCSI RAID controller on board. The OS runs on a 4.5 GB which is now mirrored to a second one, and the main "webspace" runs on a RAID 5 array with 3 18 GB drives (so that's 36 GB usable). This should ensure dataloss doesn't happen again. I was actually in process of installing the OS when the main webserver died (ie. I had STARTED the process several weeks ago but never had time to finish it. The way it goes sometimes. At least a I had machine to move it to when I had time).

[LordArt]

As an update, I HAVE noticed that certain threads have disappeared if the last poster was one of the users who "disappeared". The obvious one to me was the application thread. I posted on the tail end of it so it would show up again. So if there are other threads I should be looking for that are missing, please tell me. Thanks.

[LordArt]

Considering the date of the original thread posts, I think this is becoming a yearly thing!

Basically, even though I put this site on a RAID array, TWO drives crashed simultaniously (no, I don't know how you pull that one either). In anycase, I was able to aquire appropriate replacement drives and was able to get 99.9% of the data off via a series of power ups and downs of the server. Some stuff was simply corrupted, but considering the database and OS sits on a different array that wasn't affected, I doubt you'll notice anything different on this end.

Just wanted to explain why the site was down for a few days!