As I was leaving for the evening the transformer was smoking and leaking the oil that is inside to keep it cool. Called 911 and sat around with the firemen and watched the transformer turn black….I left to get dinner and came back to a smoldering boiling oil transformer…
On Thursday PSE&G put in a new transformer and the electricians took all day to rerun the cables from the transformer into the building and get them reconnected. Then the fun started…
At 7:30pm the power was restored….
At 7:45pm it became obvious that the main File Server for work was not going to re-boot….
From then on I tried all the tricks of Windows NT administration to get the system to boot back into NT. From an ERC disk to a regular NT boot disk.
Around 11pm I decided to try a parallel install but it kept giving me blue screen of death. I did get in once and saw that the data on the raid container was still intact. The reason this machine takes forever to work on is because it takes for ever to reboot around 2 min a reboot. And with NT you have to reboot after every change.
Around 1am Friday morning I bit the bullet and called Microsoft to get some help forgetting that you now have to pay for support so no help there.
I tried removing RAM and moving around the slots thinking a piece of RAM got fried when the power went out. I had given myself a dead line of 2am to try all the simple stuff..
At 2:00am I started to get ready to redo the OS partition….
It took only 15 min to install Windows NT and all the Dell drivers..Rebooted and….. SUCSESS…I was able to get on the machine and all the data on Raid Container….
It took the rest of the night to get the service pack,Norton Anti-Virus,our Cadd licensing server and Veritas Backup-Exec installed.
I got out of here around 7:00am Friday….
Crashed out till 11am when Carolyn woke me up to tell me Mike had called and no one could log onto the network but administrators….
So back to work for what should have been 1/2 hour but turned into another 3. The log in problem was a wrong pick in the licensing choice. I picked per server when it should have been per seat..4 clicks all fixed.
Then the complaints of lost files started which made no senses since the data was not touched. Ended up being someone else moved them to the wrong directory. What a long 3 days.
Still trying to put out fires from this situation but should be all done by the end of the day.