[NLRS] WA2VOI DISASTER

[Ford Peterson]

Donn,

I feel your pain.  

Earlier this month, my main tower took a direct lightning hit.  Destroyed
everything!  My MKV is toast, my linear--toast.  The FM equipment is shot.
All my computers, my phone system--toast.  Direct TV and Stereo are fried.
No fire, but man did that baby create problems.  It appears to have elevated
voltage on the ground system.  Who knows how high-tens of thousands of volts
maybe?  The G6-270 dual band vertical at the top of that tower was vaporized
by the blast.

I'm an accountant.  My office where I practice my craft is only 25' from the
hamshack.  My main computer was smoked by the network line, which was
attached to a common Router.  The Cat5 going from the shack computer to the
hub connected to the router was fused open.  The hub was destroyed, as was
the NIC in that computer, but the router was OK.  At the operating position,
the antenna ground found a lower impedance path back to the main electrical
panel where it jumped over to the phone line to seek a lower impedance
ground at Embarq.  Was I backed up?  Needless to say, I paced the floor for
several days over concerns about thousands of client records buried in that
black box under the desk. (Ok I was mostly concerned about my billing
records and personal bookkeeping.)

I've been using a RAID I system here for years.  (R.edundant A.nd
I.ndependent D.rive) It really paid off this time.  I was able to pull out
one of the hard drives, insert it into a new box, and the mirror did it's
magic.  Swap out the old disk for the new and it mirrored again.  I got a
little balloon message from Bill Gates that read "The Operating System has
detected operation on a substantially altered hardware configuration.  You
have 3 days to click on the following link to re-authorize your copy of XP."
I clicked on the link and 3 seconds later the message came back "Thank you
for using Microsoft."

It still took 9 calendar days to be up and running--mostly to procure a new
computer and test.  The new Intel boards come with RAID 1 configuration
right on the motherboard.  The total cost of that insurance policy is the
cost of a second identical drive.  The new 250GB drive was what?  Maybe
$125?  RAID I is by no means a complete backup system, but I was grateful
that it worked as slick as it did.  The alternative would be to rebuild and
spend weeks reconfiguring hundreds of applications and data sets.  What a
joy to simply turn on the box and be up and running as if nothing ever
happened.

The story about shack is no where near a 'happy ending.'  It's all shot.
Very disheartening to say the least.

Ford-N0FP



-----Original Message-----
From: nlrs-bounces at mailman.qth.net [mailto:nlrs-bounces at mailman.qth.net] On
Behalf Of Donn Baker
Sent: Friday, June 29, 2007 8:00 PM
To: NLRS at mailman.qth.net
Subject: [NLRS] WA2VOI DISASTER



Well, maybe a bit over dramatic, but still....

I had a TOTAL disk crash over night Jun 27-Jun28.  This included, of
course, my mail and address book. 

Basically, if you sent me mail yesterday and I didn't acknowledge it, most
likely its gone forever.  If it was (is) important, please re-send.  Sorry.

Anyone know of some place that does data recovery from dead disks ?

73 Donn
WA2VOI/0
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