So, the family file storage server died a month ago or so.

This is a machine that I built for my family which lives in the loft as an always on file server and backup device. It’s main purpose is to provide spill off room for the media centre (as that chews through scary disk space). It’s a simple old machine with a CD drive, a small disk for the OS plus two large drives for the data in a RAID 1 setup. It runs FreeNAS as it’s OS.

So about a month ago my dad told me the machine wasn’t appearing on the network anymore, so I just told him to turn it off. Today I finally got round to working out what was up. At first I thought the primary disk had failed given the BIOS said that. Who would have though, an error message that made sense and was right… nah, don’t be silly. So I tried to put a Knoppix CD to check the data was still there. CD tray would not open. I then check the BIOS again, the CD drive wasn’t there. So, unplug the CD drive and the machine boots as per normal.

So, the lesson for today, a CD/DVD drive can actually break in such a way that even while being marked at the slave device on the channel and with other set as master, can still knock out the whole channel so the BIOS things primary disk fail.

Annoying but solved.