I’ve got this server here at work that’s been having some minor hardware problems. I reported the issue to the systems engineer in charge of such things around the seventh of January. It’s the third of February and the problem still isn’t solved.

The recommended course of action I was told was to swap out the existing hard drives, one by one, to see which of the drives was causing the problem. (For those unfamiliar with RAID, this actually isn’t a problem; if you pull a drive out of a machine and put in a new one, the data magically gets restored to the new drive without missing a beat.)

I didn’t think this was too big of a deal. I’ve replaced drives before, and the general idea sounded good if maybe a little kludgy.

I replaced the third of six drives this morning and all hell broke loose. Drives started failing, the computer blue-screened on me (which actually very rarely happens)… dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria.

After about an hour of ohshitohshitohshit style troubleshooting, we got the machine to come back up, but not in a fault-tolerant state. (That is, if something else goes wrong, I’m really screwed.)

Now I’m in the process of migrating all of the data and settings from the broken machine to a new, better one. This was part of a larger plan and I was going to have to do it eventually anyway, but it’s a long process that isn’t really automated and I was going to test things out and get things working in a reliable fashion first.

From what it looks like now, I’m not getting out of here until after 5:00p. Considering that I wanted to go home early, this isn’t good news. Fucking typical.