The Underscore Archives

Hi [_],

just over a week ago our office got struck by lightning (seriously, it
blew the roof off the building) and it pretty much fried every
electronic device in the office (including the phones and the
doorbell!). Now we've managed to replace most bits and pieces
including our office server but by going through disaster recovery it
would appear there's certain things missing off of the backup tapes
(yeah, yeah, we know).

Now, we have a couple of 146GB Ultra 320 SCSI hard drives that came
out of a DELL PowerEdge 2600 server that should contain the missing
info. Server is completely dead, can't turn it on so it looks like the
power supply is fried (for a start). The problem is that the new
server supplied by DELL is RAID 5 and these disks came out of a RAID 1
machine. DELL no longer support the PowerEdge and have recommended we
don't try and do anything with it in case someone gets electrocuted.

So is there anyone out there that can handle these disks, see if they
work, and grab the data or can anyone recommend a reputable recovery
business based in or around Bristol that can retrieve the data. We've
found somewhere in Belfast that'll do a 24 hour turnaround for 800
quid (apparently), but we're nervous about posting these babies to
ireland and would prefer to deliver them in person to someone locally.

We've opened up the box and it looks like the SCSI controller is on
the motherboard so we can't simply replace the SCSI controller card.

Any advice gratefully recieved as the directors are hopping about
worried that their word docs have gone up in smoke :-)

rick (not Rick)

Disclaimer: I don't do hardware, don't even pretend to do hardware, so
if any of the above sounds like techno mumble then I apologise, I'm
just repeating what I was told (m'lord)