[There's a reason that Yoda is the unofficial mascot of SBS. Size indeed matters not.] Back to Lacie's - THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS DIVA
Fri, Sep 22 2006 12:24 bradley

Back to Lacie's

Okay so about a week or so ago I ran out of space on my Lacie 160 gig usb 2.0 harddrives I was using as backup... and I went to the local computer store and they were out of Lacie's ... so I bought a Western Digital Big Book drive... I mean drives are drives right?  Well last week middle of the night my HP did a ASR... automated system recovery... where it rebooted itself.... hmmm says I... that's not good.. no blue screen ...nothin..... okay so keep watching that.  So this morning I'm checking the morning email and I see that last nights backup failed... okay log into the server and see that the server can't see the C: drive....

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

The operation was ended.
Backup completed on 9/22/2006 at 12:48 AM. 

uh... okay... but I'm on the C: drive remotely... so what do you mean you can't see the C: drive?  (ever notice how when you start to get harddrive errors on that backup that the backup never gives you an obvious reason but points to something else...but I digress)... so off I go to the store to buy Lacie's ...good old trusty Lacie drives that never failed and never freaked out my server.. so I get the drive working again... and I stupidly start a backup running during the day.... (that's a don't do that moment on a flakey drive)...so about 11:30 the server and HP doing what they are supposed to be doing does another ASR.. middle of the day.... yeah..

So bottom line.... harddrives as a backup media are not created equal.

I'm back to my trusty (now larger) Lacie's as my media of choice.

(and nothing is being left out of this post... the server rebooted all by itself this morning while the backup was running...the drive freaked out last night.... it's not just a 'drive' but one of those funky drives that has extra software as well...whereas the Lacie is a blank drive) 

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# re: Back to Lacie's

Friday, September 22, 2006 4:05 PM by Don Murphy

Not sure what Lacie's are using for an internal drive but you can hardly beat Seagates drives esp if you purchase the ns line. All (OK maybe most ) Segate drives come with a 5 year warranty to boot.

# re: Back to Lacie's

Friday, September 22, 2006 7:09 PM by Tony

Is there more background you're leaving out? Because I don't see a connection between your server going batsh%t and a Western external drive. And I know I'll sound like an old timer, but I remember when 5 year warranty's were standard for all drives, OEM or retail. And I remember they were built better than they are now...by crackie!

# re: Back to Lacie's

Saturday, September 23, 2006 9:02 AM by Norm Wallace

S: We were seeing the exact error at aclient site using backup assist s/w to wrap around the native ntbackup. We were also using WD ext H/D to backup. Backup Assist support at: http://www.backupassist.com/KnowledgeBase/index.php/Main/HardwareFailure points at a MS KB that addresses this, BUT the hotfix is already included in Service pack 1 for W2k3 server (already installed). The final bullet point about available drive space triggered me to adjust the amount of retained backup jobs and free up more space on the W/D drive. I now only retain three B/U jobs instead of 6. I have NOT had a reoccurence of C: is not a valid drive in three weeks since, and had only good complete, verified (by NT backup and simple file restore by me) backups..... Hope this might help someone else seeing this error on an NTBACKUP/Western Digital Life book combo.

# re: Back to Lacie's

Wednesday, September 27, 2006 4:55 AM by ROSS

Ironically i have 6 WD book drives working fine on 3 sites because the lacie 160GB USB drives i did have all failed :)