Topic: Lost 2nd HDD - would like to check before I act!!

[the_owl]

Hi All!!

I was not meant to have a holiday!!

After a fantastic experience with SME solving a clients problem, we (read I, the mug) got the job of setting up a server based on SME here at it the workshop.

The idea was to replace the "make do" server that had evolved from an old windows workstation with a dedicated unit, great!

Than I was told I could only used "spares" and parts recovered from other PCs around the workshop - not so great..

Anyway, all went fine and I rolled out the unit with a 40GB hdd (lame - tell me about it!) but this was soon groaning (3 days) when they suddenly found new uses for it! - but SME had been proved to be the system I had advocated it to be so the powers that be authorized be to take a shiny new 500GB drive from stock to add to the server, as long as the groupoffice, asterisk, emails, etc etc remained unaffected.

I carefully followed the "how to" on adding a second drive thinking that to be the safest bet to keep this data on a separate HDD from the OS ,and all went without a hitch for weeks, till now two days before I'm of on my holiday!!

The server is fine in itself, but the second HDD no longer access under it's IBay, it just vanished sometime today!

I have been told in no uncertain terms the data on the drive (customers backups for repairs in progress, drivers collected over time, etc) are to be online ASAP and definitely before I take any holiday.  so I beg you all for some help here!!

I've ssh'd into root and looked at the following

fdisk -l | more

and get

Disk /dev/hda: 41.1 GB, 41110142976 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4998 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1          13      104391   83  Linux
/dev/hda2              14        4998    40042012+  8e  Linux LVM

Disk /dev/hdb: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 969021 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdb1               1      969021   488386552+  83  Linux

so the disk is still there...
then I enter try mount -a

and get

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdb1,
       or too many mounted file systems
mount: mount point 2 does not exist

the entry in fstab file hasn't changed - nothing has as far as I can see other than the drive is no longer accessible! -
trying to ls the symlink shows it in red, and it is all as normal in in server-manager!

Please tell me I'm missing something simple here - a "doh" moment would be welcome right now!!

many many thanks in advance

[smeghead]

Given

mount: mount point 2 does not exist

The drive must be mounted onto a folder somewhere, does that folder still exist & are the perms right?

[cactus]

I was not meant to have a holiday!!

I hope you fix this soon so you can have your holiday, you deserve one after fixing things, just so you can relax . After your holiday I would advice you to speak to the person in charge and explain that you need a proper system to guarantee up-time and to prevent data loss.

AFAIK hardware like harddisks are not that expansive anymore. If I were your boss I would invest a little to prevent issues like you are experiencing at the moment. I would at least have some (hardware) RAID mechanism in my system so that harddrive failure is a little less painfull.
To me it seems the data you can not access at the moment is pretty valuable to your company. I would at least invest in a proper and thoroughly tested backup method in case things go AWOL again.