> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf
> Of Richard Maloley II
> 
> I unplugged all the SATA cables and put it all back together. I am
> fairly confident that the two drives for the OS were reconnected to the
> proper ports on the RAID card, otherwise I feel the RAID BIOS would
> have given me an error message.

Oh dear.


> My customer called the next day and complained that they are missing
> all their email/calendar entries after 2/11/2010. Nothing is there
> after that date except for new items that came in after I left for the
> night.
> 
> I checked the event logs - same thing! Log files are all blank from
> 2/11/2010 until 4/14/2010.

You are certainly at high risk right now.  And the longer things go on, the
higher your risk becomes.  Here's what I suggest:

Disclaimer:  This process could in fact cause risk for you.  You're
responsible for your own actions if you follow my advice.  I'm just some
random stranger on the Internet, and you'd be irresponsible to take my
advice unless you know what you're doing even better than I do.

Shutdown, disconnect all drives.  Connect *only* one of the OS disks.  Boot
up, see if it's ok.  If not ... Shutdown, connect *only* the other OS disk.
Boot up, see if it's ok.  If not ... all hope is lost.

For what it's worth:  ntbackup is not sufficient to backup your OS.  You can
use it to backup your data files, on your data drive, but not your OS.  Even
if you have valid backup, of the OS, the restore path is to reinstall
windows, and repeat everything that's ever been done on that OS.  That is
not a recovery plan if you ask me.

In fact, you said, email and calendar items were lost.  You're not using
ntbackup to backup Exchange, are you?  You can't do that.

Also, you need to revisit your system backup process.  You can use something
like "dd" to make a complete byte-for-byte image of your OS disk, but in
order to restore, you'd have to have the same or identically equivalent
hardware to restore onto.  This is one of the areas where virtualization is
very valuable.  If your windows server were running as a VM, you could back
it up, copy to new hardware, and boot it up again with no issues.


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