My GDC SA2100 Won't boot

[Frank Cox]

Have you tried the suggested fix that shows up on your screen, i.e. running e2fsck with an alternate superblock?

dumpe2fs /dev/sda | grep -i superblock

Pick one of the alternate superblocks from the list, then:

e2fsck -f -b SuperblockNumberHere /dev/sda

[Paul Gabriel]

Have you tried the suggested fix that shows up on your screen, i.e. running e2fsck with an alternate superblock?

dumpe2fs /dev/sda | grep -i superblock

Pick one of the alternate superblocks from the list, then:

e2fsck -f -b SuperblockNumberHere /dev/sda

Thanks! was able to run fsck /dev/sda3 to successfully fix the issue.

[Paul Gabriel]

Did you try to boot from CD only? The problem might be in the BIOS settings, where booting from CD is not enabled. Since the BIOS is password protected, have you tried to boot from an USB stick or USB DVD drive? I've seen a GDC server hanging on trying to boot from an external USB disk.

Thank You Much, the DSRroot is on dev/sda3. I went ahead to run "fsck /dev/sda3" and it ran succesfully. The server boots fine now. Server fixed.jpeg

[Paul Gabriel]

A big thanks to everybody who contributed to providing a solution to my server issue, the problem has been fixed.
I await GDC's response on server update and certificate update.

[Sean McKinnon]

And why couldn't GDC support offer him this fix?

[Frank Cox]

'Cause he's got us, instead!

[Carsten Kurz]

Paul - if I was you, I would create a clone of that drive as soon as possible. No big thing after what you went through just now.

- Carsten

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Marcel,

Since the server has been fixed I will skip most of your BS. As for media blocks failing They are the only ones that I did have fail out of 334 GDC servers that I installed. And they failed very shortly after the upgrade was done, five in all, like by the next week. Other than those, I had several media blocks fail because of dead certificate batteries at several customers that did not have regular service, or have service at all. Well, they got serviced at that point! BTW: All 334 of those servers are still humming along and about 25% of them are 10+ years old.

Mark

[Leo Enticknap]

Agreed with Carsten. I like Clonezilla for this purpose - simply remove your system drive from its server, attach it to a SATA to USB converter, boot a Clonezilla USB stick in any other PC, then use Clonezilla to create a clone file from your system drive, which you can then burn onto another hard drive and install in the server in the event that yours totally dies.

[Paul Gabriel]

Agreed with Carsten. I like Clonezilla for this purpose - simply remove your system drive from its server, attach it to a SATA to USB converter, boot a Clonezilla USB stick in any other PC, then use Clonezilla to create a clone file from your system drive, which you can then burn onto another hard drive and install in the server in the event that yours totally dies.

Thank You much.

[Steve Guttag]

I've been having good luck with StarTech's duplicator. It is a standalone hardware piece with two slots for plugging in the two drives. You do have to remove the drive from the server to use it but it is literally two button pushes. One to put it into copy mode, the other to start the copy. Once done, everything is cloned, bit-for-bit...computers wake up as if they've always had that HDD installed. SDOCK2U33RE

[Carsten Kurz]

Yup, I have one of those standalone clone docks as well. I think the only thing you have to make sure is that the target drive has at least the same capacity as the source drive. Otherwise, it's quick, easy and safe, and the resulting clone can immediately be tested.

JUST DON'T MIX SOURCE AND TARGET DRIVE!!!11! ;-)

- Carsten

[Harold Hallikainen]

I've used G4L to make drive images and clones for many years now. And, I agree with Carsten: Don't mix source and destination!

[Marcel Birgelen]

Great to see the machine has been fixed. I agree with Carsten that cloning the drive is a very reasonable thing to do, especially since the drive has encountered previous errors, there might be a lingering hardware issue.

Also, I endorse Harold's choice for G4L, it's a free utility that gets the job done. I used Acronis TrueImage in the far past to make and deploy images of all kinds of media, but they jumped the shark after a powerful utility turned into a trainwreck of bloatware a few years back.

Marcel,

Since the server has been fixed I will skip most of your BS.

Can you please point out what B.S. you're referring to?

I'm not here to claim victory for myself as many people participated in solving the problem for Paul. You weren't really one of them though...

Running a manual "fsck" using an external recovery image via USB seemed to have done the trick. Frank pointed out how to point fsck to the alternate superblock, which eventually fixed the filesystem inconsistencies and allowed the server to boot again.

I fail to spot the B.S. in here...

[Randy Stankey]

One of the things I do in order to take care of my computers is make a clone of the main/master hard drive and store it away, safely.

Having a rescue CD or recovery software is important but I think it’s more important to have a clean copy of the OS, ready to run, in case it is needed.

On my computer, the hard drives are on sleds that can be swapped out in less than a minute without need of tools. If I ever have a problem that I can’t solve in reasonable time, all I have to do is shut down, pop the cover, slide out the old drive and put the new on in its place.

I can not recommend this enough.

It has saved my ass on more than one occasion.