It's good to have friends...

I have been working for three weeks now on my downed iTunes server at home. It has 1.2T of iTunes stuff on it which represents all the TV shows and movies this family ever watches! It was protected in a RAID5 array but the mobo went bad and the RAID struggled to move to a different mobo and then back to the same type of mobo it had several disks that no longer knew they were in the RAID. Well, at my place of work this has been a huge item for discussion. Software RAID vs. hardware RAID and NAS devices vs. attached storage as well as how to fix it. The first and best bet has been trying to get nVidia, the manufacturer of the mobo, to tell me how to force a read of the disks so they can be put back into the RAID array. After going back and forth and back and forth many many times with the delay of at least 24 hours and usually more like 36 hours from my response to getting a response from them as well as getting a new person each time, they came to the conclusion that my data was fried.

The good news is I have friends. I have nerd friends. And you see, nerds just love complex problems. We thrive on them. An issue like the failed RAID is the kind of thing that will be put in our melons to think about later or wake up in the middle of the night with an idea to try. A friend of mine worked several evenings looking up many different permutations and believes he has worked out how to get it fixed with linux. So right now I am downloading a Live CD for Linux that will boot into linux and rebuild the RAID to make it functional so I can then copy all the data off to network storage. I am so glad this problem was stuck in his head as he is the expert at Linux and arrays. I should know if it was a success or failure by tomorrow.