Fire Damaged Hard Drives

I would like to take a moment to mention a few things about fire damage to hard drives. We received an interesting job over the weekend which was a Dell Poweredge server that had been in a fire. Amazingly, the server was in pretty good shape (this will not always be the case!). There were 4 hard drives in the server configured in a RAID 5 array. The hard drives were burnt somewhat and smelled of soot. We were able to repair the disks, get images of all 4 disks, destripe the RAID, and recover the data by Monday evening. This is probably as lucky as you will get working with fire damaged hard drives. This is why it is so important to perform regular backups of your data and store it offsite. The fate of the company was pretty much riding on the condition of these 4 little hard drives.

Now for some humor. Going forward, for each blog entry I will include a joke of the day. Sounds kind of corny-but if it makes readers laugh and lighten up, then it has served its purpose:

One day two drinking buddies, Jim and Dave, were working on aircraft at JFK airport in NYC. They got fogged in and finished up their work early and were sitting around bored. Jim spoke up, “Man I really need a drink!”“You know I heard a rumor you could drink jet fuel and get drunk.” Dave said.“Really?” said Jim.“That’s what I heard. Wanna try it?”“Sure, hell I’ll try anything once!” So with that they poured themselves a couple of glasses and began drinking the jet fuel. They sipped a little bit to find it actually tasted quiet good. So they drank more and more and sure enough they got stoned drunk. The next morning Jim awoke feeling like a million bucks he jumped up wet to the bathroom feeling great like he was floating on air he hadn’t felt this good in years. “Wow!” He said. About that time Jim’s telephone rang… “Hello?”“Hello Jim, this is Dave. How are you feeling this morning?”“Man I feel great, no hang over, no sick, I feel like a million bucks. How about you?”“Me too, but I have one question for you.”“Sure, what is it”“Have you farted yet?”“Ummmmm No. Why?”“DON’T. I’m in Phoenix!”