Phoenix
Member # 013
Two lucky things this week:
1. I was just outside and bent over to pet the cat. Wham! An acorn hit me in the back of the neck. Lucky I don't live in Hawaii.
2. I noticed about three weeks ago that one of our RIP's (computer to drive color printers) only had a single disk drive. We update lots of custom files on this RIP on a daily basis, so it has lots of custom work on it that cannot be easily restored. So I contacted the manufacturer and ordered a RAID card and a second disk drive so that I could mirror the drive. Mirror means that if one drive fails, the other drive is an exact replica and things continue pretty much as normal until you can replace the faulty drive, at which time it gets copied onto so that you always have a "hot spare."
Monday the parts arrived, so Monday afternoon I started to install them in the system according to directions provided. It soon became obvious that I needed help, and I was on my cell phone with support for about 4 hours. The support person also remotely controlled the computer while I watched. (Great program named logmein) Nothing went right. I had to download a CD image and burn it. Eventually I even had to create a DOS bootable diskette. Lucky I still had some diskettes!
Tuesday morning another three hours on the phone and we finally got the mirror drive working. Two hours while it duplicated itself, and all was in place. I felt much better. Forward to Friday morning. The alarm on the new RAID controller went off. It turned out that the original two-year-old drive in the system chose that time to fail. The mirror drive took over and functioned perfectly. Is that great timing or what!?
1. I was just outside and bent over to pet the cat. Wham! An acorn hit me in the back of the neck. Lucky I don't live in Hawaii.
2. I noticed about three weeks ago that one of our RIP's (computer to drive color printers) only had a single disk drive. We update lots of custom files on this RIP on a daily basis, so it has lots of custom work on it that cannot be easily restored. So I contacted the manufacturer and ordered a RAID card and a second disk drive so that I could mirror the drive. Mirror means that if one drive fails, the other drive is an exact replica and things continue pretty much as normal until you can replace the faulty drive, at which time it gets copied onto so that you always have a "hot spare."
Monday the parts arrived, so Monday afternoon I started to install them in the system according to directions provided. It soon became obvious that I needed help, and I was on my cell phone with support for about 4 hours. The support person also remotely controlled the computer while I watched. (Great program named logmein) Nothing went right. I had to download a CD image and burn it. Eventually I even had to create a DOS bootable diskette. Lucky I still had some diskettes!
Tuesday morning another three hours on the phone and we finally got the mirror drive working. Two hours while it duplicated itself, and all was in place. I felt much better. Forward to Friday morning. The alarm on the new RAID controller went off. It turned out that the original two-year-old drive in the system chose that time to fail. The mirror drive took over and functioned perfectly. Is that great timing or what!?
