A few months ago we took over the IT support for an insurance firm in the City, but with the contract we inherited a problem the previous IT company couldn't resolve. Part of the firm's business still ran on a ten year SCO Unix server which was barely clinging to life and hadn't been backed up for three years. They still had a support contract with the original suppliers of the SCO system but they had quoted over £10k to migrate their data to the current platform. The system was running on borrowed time and every reboot could have been its last so we had to come up with a solution.

I received a phone call from a friend who uses a Macbook and they asked me if it is bad when you turn the Mac on if nothing appears on the screen except a folder showing a question mark. After a few minutes of research and a few probing questions I found that the hard drive was making the dreaded clicking noise. It was apparent that the hard drive in the Macbook had died!

 In this particular model Macbook the hard drive was accessible by removing the battery then unscrewing a metal bracket and simply pulling the drive out. Once I had the drive out I attached it to my laptop using a SATA to USB adaptor and booted with Knoppix to see if the drive was accessible at all. The drive was not recognised at first so I tried a full SATA connection in my main computer. I could now see the drive in Vista under Storage Manager but it would not mount at all and it just clicked loudly. Usually this means that the heads are stuck or damaged and at worse they have started to scratch the platter.

Whilst checking our client's backups I've come across several common problems so I thought I would share the solutions.

Errors: Could not access portions of directory System State\COM+ Class Registration Database. 
You may not have permission to open the file, or the directory may be missing or damaged. 
Please contact the owner or administrator. "

Error: Could not access portions of directory System State\Registry. 
You may not have permission to open the file, or the directory may be missing or damaged. 
Please contact the owner or administrator. 

Error 0x80042316

Error returned while creating the volume shadow copy:0x8007000e.

Error returned while creating the volume shadow copy:Not enough storage is available to complete this operation.

Error: The device reported an error on a request to write data to media.

Error reported: Invalid command.

Error: D: is not a valid drive or you do not have access.

Error: WATSONSVR\Microsoft Information Store\First Storage Group is not a valid drive or you do not have access.

Error: Event 8001 8019 NTbackup error occurred periodically in event viewer.  These errors may occur if your Exchange Server 2003 database files are located on the same drive as the Windows Server 2003 operating system.

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We recently had an enquiry from a client who has around 150 Linux servers in about 20 data centres scattered around the UK. They have a perfectly effective backup solution but were interested in improving their Disaster Recovery, in particular how to speed up recovery of a server in the event of hardware failure. In particular they wanted a solution that would allow them to take complete system images that when required could be quickly restored to a replacement server. Not only that but it had to be doable remotely and by a non-Linux technician following a simple sheet of instructions.