Old Server just wanted to die!

Yesterday, we had a server go out in our server room, it was nothing bad, just a winnt 4.0 indexer server. It was an Intel 150 MHz with 64 mb ram. This server just did some indexing for a sql program for us so it didn’t need to be fast. Anyways when I brought it in to my shop I found that the power supply blew.

I replaced the power supply and turned it on. I then notice that the fan on the CPU went out (I know it doesnt need a fan on a 150 MHz) so I replaced the fan. I turned it back on and tried booting the system. Well winnt came up with an error saying it needs to be repaired please use setup from the cd and hit r.

So I hooked up a SCSI cdrom and got 3 boot disks (to old to boot from cdrom) I entered the first floppy (Setup Disk 1) The machine started booting from the floppy than hung up at Starting Windows Setup So I tried another setup disk. I went through 6 Setup disk and neither would work. I then got a new floppy ribbon and floppy drive. I boot off the floppies again well they didn’t work they hung up at the same message. I then took the floppies to another machine to see if the floppies were bad but there were not.

I think this server just wanted to die and be left alone. I got out my trusty Norton 7.0 Ghost network disk, and I tried to ghost the 150 MHz machine. It failed, forgetting that the older BIOS’s didn’t work with Ghost 5+ so I used ghost 4.1D and it worked, I got a full backup on the drive. During the ghost, Norton ghost said that there are bad sectors on the disk, about 15 of them.

I got a new hard drive and ghosted the image back onto this new hard drive. I’m still getting the same error about going into setup on the cd. I said forget it. I went to the grave yard of computers (as we call it) I picked up an Intergraph TD-300 (yup Intergraph very old and not company anymore) I placed the new hard drive with he ghosted image on it, into the new TD-300.

I tried booting it, it failed. I then got out the Windows NT 4.0 cd and booted off it. Success I reinstalled NT over the old. I got into the machine. One problem ALL the profiles were gone. :(

This was very bad. No profiles no indexer file. The program needed was setup by a company and no one knew what the name of it or anything, they just clicked on an icon called indexer.

Luckily I had the Norton ghost image. By remote I open the ghost image found the profiles and restored them to the indexer machine. Now all I had to do was remake the user’s accounts. Now when I did that they didn’t take over the profiles I restored on. So I rebooted went in as administrator and renamed the restored profiles to the one windows made for the accounts.

After all that keeping the indexer alive I did it, I made indexer stay alive.

The indexer program was a mapped program accross the network go figure.