For those who haven't read the BOS RSS feed, the BOS message boards or the ESEA message boards, here some info:

The hard drive containing the databases has been giving trouble these last few days. It is close to give up. I have two hard drives which was planned to be used as a replacement for the boot/system drive, but this is more important right now. So this weekend I will spend some time replacing the database drive. I will try to build a RAID with these two new hard drives, but this may take some time, as it is the first RAID I've ever made. Keeping all data/programs completely intact during the process is an extra task, and may make it take a bit longer, as I don't have a third clean hard drive to save things on. But I'll do my best to do this as fast as possible. If all things go wrong I have back-ups.

So, just so you know, the BOS site and services and the ESEA site will be down for a while this weekend.

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BOS, ESEA ???
eh? Is this Cafe talk ? lost ??

RAIDs are pretty easy to set up and once you have the RAID1 mirror setup you should just boot to a CD with a Imaging program on it, e.g. Ghost, image centre (aka drive image), but I recently used Acronis True Image 8 and it worked first time no problem and very easy. I was quite supprised since I had used earlier Acronis programs and didn't like them.

Only problem you'll have is if the RAID drive is going to be your OS drive as well since it just may not boot the OS without a Repair or reinstall on it.
You may be lucky but you'll probably have a better chance if you install the RAID drivers onto the OS first.. of course this is assuming windows, Linux/Mac I have NO idea, the the cloning should be the same for Linux.

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Team mauisun.org

ESEA is European Space Exploration Agency (or something like that and is the name of his team). So I assume he hosts his teams website and it will be down. [edit] yup, he hosts the team page www.esea.dk/esea/boinc.asp

BOS is the box seen on many sites which indicate which projects are up/down/unreacheable, such as the one on the Boincsynergy main page (left hand side down a few boxes.
looks like this. See tag at bottom.

I thought it may have been a team page (advert) and hence a Cafe issue ;-)
But if BOS is something important than well may be, though I don't see BoincStats, mudayweb ... comming in here ;)

Was more curios how it effect Rosetta@home / Ralph as it sounded quite and important announcment.

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Team mauisun.org

FluffyChicken:

Well, it's always a question wether I should post something like this in the Cafe or in Number Crunching ;) Had it only affected the team site it would propably go in the Cafe, but since BOS is so widely used, I choose Number Crunching.

And thanks for reminding me about the driver (forgot about that...). Only problem I see is the image - I don't have anything to store the image on, once I've setup the RAID with both drives on it... I hope I can setup the RAID with just the one drive on it, restore the image to the one drive on the raid and then put the other drive on it and the the raid "re-build"

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FluffyChicken:

Well, it's always a question wether I should post something like this in the Cafe or in Number Crunching ;) Had it only affected the team site it would propably go in the Cafe, but since BOS is so widely used, I choose Number Crunching.

And thanks for reminding me about the driver (forgot about that...). Only problem I see is the image - I don't have anything to store the image on, once I've setup the RAID with both drives on it... I hope I can setup the RAID with just the one drive on it, restore the image to the one drive on the raid and then put the other drive on it and the the raid "re-build"

Ah so your using the drive you currently have,

It may work.
Create the Mirror array on the new drive.
Image accross to the new drive from the current drive.
Check it boots and works, if so add current drive.. let is srot itself out..
Good luck since I've never tried that :-)

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Team mauisun.org

FluffyChicken:

Well, it's always a question wether I should post something like this in the Cafe or in Number Crunching ;) Had it only affected the team site it would propably go in the Cafe, but since BOS is so widely used, I choose Number Crunching.

And thanks for reminding me about the driver (forgot about that...). Only problem I see is the image - I don't have anything to store the image on, once I've setup the RAID with both drives on it... I hope I can setup the RAID with just the one drive on it, restore the image to the one drive on the raid and then put the other drive on it and the the raid "re-build"

Ah so your using the drive you currently have,

It may work.
Create the Mirror array on the new drive.
Image accross to the new drive from the current drive.
Check it boots and works, if so add current drive.. let is srot itself out..
Good luck since I've never tried that :-)

Well, as you'll see in the next post, things didn't work out the way I planned ;)

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I've spent the last few days checking everything was working correctly, and it seems so. This is what happened Sunday:

Around 10 am local time, the database drive stalled once again, and I shut down the system, knowing I was going to correct things later.

Around 3 pm local time, I had moved everything to my work area, and wanted to start up to test everything would work fine when attempting to do the drive switch. But now the database drive box didn't start at all - no fan, no light, nothing. The other one seemed to start as usual. I thought it might be the power supply, so I switch to the other power supply - this time the box started, but I really didn't like the sound, so I turned it off quickly. The other box didn't like the power supply from the database drive box.

So, now I had two drives that I didn't know if I could even get working. Anyway, with two drives to switch and only two drives to replace them, I could wave goodbye to my RAID plans. The only hope I had was that it was the external boxes that were failing, not the hard drives themselves. And it turned out to be just that. So after I had copied the database drive successfully, I made the sites available again while copying the other drives - before moving things back where they belong.

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