Huge Mistake
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@IRJ said in Huge Mistake:
@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
Was the boss' plan to format the drive meant to be done with both drives in there currently?
There is a big lesson in this statement. I think the majority of us would have shut down and removed power from the drive we didnt want to format. This doesn't even allow this mistake to ever happen.
And I think my problem was not understanding what he meant.
So the whole issue stemmed from a Seagate hard drive crashing, but we use FakeRAID 1 which i was told was "Mirror RAID" so the PC still worked and we just needed to replace the bad drive.
Seagate Hard Drives would continuously fail thoughout the past so they moved to WD. -
@Pete-S said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
but since we have to try and Screw over our customers as much as possible, and not do it the right way, and just replace both hard drives
While often that appears to be the logic, how did this screw over the customer here? Wasn't this going to get the customer up faster and cheaper?
It was my understanding that the customer was planning on buying new hard drives since we couldn't put a Western Digital with a Seagate.
It wasn't until I got to the office.Why can't you mix the drives? It's software RAID, it doesn't care.
When I've tried to do it in the past it wouldn't work. when I asked my boss he said " because you can't mix the drives. bring it back and we'll add 2 WD drives and pull the information back.."
you can mix drives ? in a Mirror RAID (if that's the right term for it) environment.
You can mix but it absolutely best to have two identical drives with identical size and performance. We'd never build a new array with mixed drives.
ah, The way my company taught me was Never to do that because it causes more issues.
Good to know it can happen in case of emergency. -
@Dashrender said in Huge Mistake:
@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
but since we have to try and Screw over our customers as much as possible, and not do it the right way, and just replace both hard drives
While often that appears to be the logic, how did this screw over the customer here? Wasn't this going to get the customer up faster and cheaper?
It was my understanding that the customer was planning on buying new hard drives since we couldn't put a Western Digital with a Seagate.
It wasn't until I got to the office.Why can't you mix the drives? It's software RAID, it doesn't care.
Because they have crazy people at his work who don't know this.
FYI - you could even put a larger drive in, you would just end up only using the amount of space on the smaller one.
guess that would make sense. Not sure anyone here would it see it that way.
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@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
you can mix drives ? in a Mirror RAID (if that's the right term for it) environment.
You probably should take the A+ training on this site shared by @scottalanmiller . Usually A+ isn't recommended for most IT career paths, but what you are doing on a daily basis would match up well with A+.
You have asked about training here several times and then bring up not being able to move up in your career. This is basic stuff and you should really consider building a foundation on something even if its A+ and then branch out from there.
This not to pick on you, but hopefully give you a chance to move forward in your career with tough love. You need to focus on training and follow through. You aren't brand new (2-6 months) in IT anymore.
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@IRJ said in Huge Mistake:
If you are doing PC repair often, a hardware cloner can help. Back when I was doing desktops, I could clone a drive in 5-10 mins. SSDs are a fraction of that now.
I learned your same lesson and always had spare HDs that I would use to clone information. Somebody on here will talk about how this is bad for SSDs to be written over and over, and they are right to a point. However, to reach that write level is pretty fucking difficult and drives are cheap. So cover your ass by cloning especially in a situation like this.
Yeah I still have a toaster that will do block by block cloning. You just pop the drives in and hit the button.
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@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
@Pete-S said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
but since we have to try and Screw over our customers as much as possible, and not do it the right way, and just replace both hard drives
While often that appears to be the logic, how did this screw over the customer here? Wasn't this going to get the customer up faster and cheaper?
It was my understanding that the customer was planning on buying new hard drives since we couldn't put a Western Digital with a Seagate.
It wasn't until I got to the office.Why can't you mix the drives? It's software RAID, it doesn't care.
When I've tried to do it in the past it wouldn't work. when I asked my boss he said " because you can't mix the drives. bring it back and we'll add 2 WD drives and pull the information back.."
you can mix drives ? in a Mirror RAID (if that's the right term for it) environment.
You can mix but it absolutely best to have two identical drives with identical size and performance. We'd never build a new array with mixed drives.
ah, The way my company taught me was Never to do that because it causes more issues.
Good to know it can happen in case of emergency.They taught you not to mirror drives that are exactly the same?
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@IRJ said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
you can mix drives ? in a Mirror RAID (if that's the right term for it) environment.
You probably should take the A+ training on this site shared by @scottalanmiller . Usually A+ isn't recommended for most IT career paths, but what you are doing on a daily basis would match up well with A+.
You have asked about training here several times and then bring up not being able to move up in your career. This is basic stuff and you should really consider building a foundation on something even if its A+ and then branch out from there.
This not to pick on you, but hopefully give you a chance to move forward in your career with tough love. You need to focus on training and follow through. You aren't brand new (2-6 months) in IT anymore.
I took a course for A+ back in Middle school, And passed. Dont remember That being Covered.
But that was over 13 years ago by now, and I never used it again until after high school. Probably could use a refresher.The way it works here is 60% of calls are Software related strictly to Aloha
20% Windows OS issues
15% hardware swaps/troubleshooting .
5% computer hardware (like this one) -
@stacksofplates said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
@Pete-S said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
but since we have to try and Screw over our customers as much as possible, and not do it the right way, and just replace both hard drives
While often that appears to be the logic, how did this screw over the customer here? Wasn't this going to get the customer up faster and cheaper?
It was my understanding that the customer was planning on buying new hard drives since we couldn't put a Western Digital with a Seagate.
It wasn't until I got to the office.Why can't you mix the drives? It's software RAID, it doesn't care.
When I've tried to do it in the past it wouldn't work. when I asked my boss he said " because you can't mix the drives. bring it back and we'll add 2 WD drives and pull the information back.."
you can mix drives ? in a Mirror RAID (if that's the right term for it) environment.
You can mix but it absolutely best to have two identical drives with identical size and performance. We'd never build a new array with mixed drives.
ah, The way my company taught me was Never to do that because it causes more issues.
Good to know it can happen in case of emergency.They taught you not to mirror drives that are exactly the same?
More or less...
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@IRJ said in Huge Mistake:
@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
Was the boss' plan to format the drive meant to be done with both drives in there currently?
There is a big lesson in this statement. I think the majority of us would have shut down and removed power from the drive we didnt want to format. This doesn't even allow this mistake to ever happen.
Right, typically that's what I would expect, since the drive is being removed anyway. And to format on another machine, if possible. Formatting is a terrifying process in general.
And in this case, wasn't part of the work. It was just an extra thing done for no known reason. Why the boss wanted any format done at all is unclear.
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@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
@Pete-S said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
but since we have to try and Screw over our customers as much as possible, and not do it the right way, and just replace both hard drives
While often that appears to be the logic, how did this screw over the customer here? Wasn't this going to get the customer up faster and cheaper?
It was my understanding that the customer was planning on buying new hard drives since we couldn't put a Western Digital with a Seagate.
It wasn't until I got to the office.Why can't you mix the drives? It's software RAID, it doesn't care.
When I've tried to do it in the past it wouldn't work. when I asked my boss he said " because you can't mix the drives. bring it back and we'll add 2 WD drives and pull the information back.."
you can mix drives ? in a Mirror RAID (if that's the right term for it) environment.
You can mix but it absolutely best to have two identical drives with identical size and performance. We'd never build a new array with mixed drives.
ah, The way my company taught me was Never to do that because it causes more issues.
Good to know it can happen in case of emergency.It's nice to use matching drives, obviously. But there is no concept of an issue with mismatched drives in RAID. That's one of those myths that arose in the mid-2000s, but no one knows why. It's never been a thing.
You get the absolute best performance and capacity by having them be matched, but there's no "problem" with unmatched drives. Many people even promote that for safety, but I wouldn't go that far. I'd always do matched drives all things being equal.
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@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
The way my company taught me
This is consistently biting you in the ass, or at least leading you astray. You know that you don't have IT people there and they have little to no understanding of IT processes, technology, etc. Not that they get everything wrong, but they clearly don't understand what they are telling you in case after case and are just repeating things that they think that they heard somewhere. Like your boss wanting you to format a drive before adding it to an array, clearly he is missing some really basic drive knowledge. It's not a big deal that he doesn't understand IT fundamentals, but you keep coming back to "they told me" in thread after thread and I know that you are not defending them, but you keep letting them confuse you.
Basically... if they tell you something you need to either ignore it out of hand, or go immediately and research it. Because they are literally moving you backwards.
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@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
So the whole issue stemmed from a Seagate hard drive crashing, but we use FakeRAID 1 which i was told was "Mirror RAID" so the PC still worked and we just needed to replace the bad drive.
FakeRAID = software RAID that is sold with the pretense of being hardware, it exists for malicious purposes
"Mirror RAID" = RAID 1, it's a bizarre way that someone who doesn't work in IT might try to explain a standard term.
Yes, the PC should have continued to have worked both as it was, and once the failed drive was removed, and with the new drive put in. That it was FakeRAID or mirrored aren't factors in that, just that it was RAID that wasn't RAID 0 was all that mattered there. They weren't wrong, just not really relevant.
This is why a backup was easy to do, because the system was still working fine. It's also why there was no need to format or do all the extra steps.
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In a case like this, the simplest process is to do what is intended by the system design...
- Take a backup before doing anything else.
- Remove the failed drive.
- Replace with a drive of equal or larger size (any brand, make, model, etc.)
- Tell the RAID system to use that drive to rebuild.
That's it. Fast, simple, safe. This is what the RAID system is designed for and how it is intended to be used.
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@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
@Dashrender said in Huge Mistake:
@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
but since we have to try and Screw over our customers as much as possible, and not do it the right way, and just replace both hard drives
While often that appears to be the logic, how did this screw over the customer here? Wasn't this going to get the customer up faster and cheaper?
It was my understanding that the customer was planning on buying new hard drives since we couldn't put a Western Digital with a Seagate.
It wasn't until I got to the office.Why can't you mix the drives? It's software RAID, it doesn't care.
Because they have crazy people at his work who don't know this.
FYI - you could even put a larger drive in, you would just end up only using the amount of space on the smaller one.
guess that would make sense. Not sure anyone here would it see it that way.
As mentioned by others, it's not advisable - you end up with likely performance issues because the drives might operate at different performance levels, but at worse really, you should mostly only be as bad as the slowest drive (but I can think of reasons why it could be much worse than that).
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@Dashrender said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
@Dashrender said in Huge Mistake:
@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
but since we have to try and Screw over our customers as much as possible, and not do it the right way, and just replace both hard drives
While often that appears to be the logic, how did this screw over the customer here? Wasn't this going to get the customer up faster and cheaper?
It was my understanding that the customer was planning on buying new hard drives since we couldn't put a Western Digital with a Seagate.
It wasn't until I got to the office.Why can't you mix the drives? It's software RAID, it doesn't care.
Because they have crazy people at his work who don't know this.
FYI - you could even put a larger drive in, you would just end up only using the amount of space on the smaller one.
guess that would make sense. Not sure anyone here would it see it that way.
As mentioned by others, it's not advisable - you end up with likely performance issues because the drives might operate at different performance levels, but at worse really, you should mostly only be as bad as the slowest drive (but I can think of reasons why it could be much worse than that).
It CAN be slower than the slowest drive, but only by the tiniest bit.
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@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
I took a course for A+ back in Middle school, And passed. Dont remember That being Covered.
It likely wasn't. Probably because your school didn't cover all of it. And also because the A+ didn't used to have anything to do with IT, it was garbage. Then it became so famously bad that they did a LOT of work to make it at least passably useful. So the material on it now is 20x better than it used to be. Still not wonderful, but so much better.
Now it covers real networking basics, RAID, drives, etc. It's enough that we make all of our crew go through it just to make sure that they have baselines. We don't make them do the printer stuff and other things that are rarely used or applicable, and we don't make them get the examples, but it's free and trivial to go through the material, so we have them do that. And that's why I took the time to make the guide here, because that's where my team finds it.
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@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
The way it works here is 60% of calls are Software related strictly to Aloha
20% Windows OS issues
15% hardware swaps/troubleshooting .
5% computer hardware (like this one)That's not that uncommon as a breakdown for many industries. Say you worked with dentists...
60% Eaglesoft
20% Windows
15% Hardware Basics
5% something unusual and hard -
@IRJ said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
you can mix drives ? in a Mirror RAID (if that's the right term for it) environment.
You probably should take the A+ training on this site shared by @scottalanmiller . Usually A+ isn't recommended for most IT career paths, but what you are doing on a daily basis would match up well with A+.
You have asked about training here several times and then bring up not being able to move up in your career. This is basic stuff and you should really consider building a foundation on something even if its A+ and then branch out from there.
This not to pick on you, but hopefully give you a chance to move forward in your career with tough love. You need to focus on training and follow through. You aren't brand new (2-6 months) in IT anymore.
I'd agree. Don't spend money on the cert, but grab a beer in the evenings and go through each of the video training sessions one per night. Takes 5-15 minutes, tops. There is a thread for each one here. Ask any questions that you have in real time.
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@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
The way my company taught me
This is consistently biting you in the ass, or at least leading you astray. You know that you don't have IT people there and they have little to no understanding of IT processes, technology, etc. Not that they get everything wrong, but they clearly don't understand what they are telling you in case after case and are just repeating things that they think that they heard somewhere. Like your boss wanting you to format a drive before adding it to an array, clearly he is missing some really basic drive knowledge. It's not a big deal that he doesn't understand IT fundamentals, but you keep coming back to "they told me" in thread after thread and I know that you are not defending them, but you keep letting them confuse you.
Basically... if they tell you something you need to either ignore it out of hand, or go immediately and research it. Because they are literally moving you backwards.
Yeah, I add that in as a "Hey, so we already know , no one here really has an understanding of Actual IT, as it's only a small portion of our business, and since I work here this is the way they want me to do things"
Not so much as a "well my company said this is how it's done, so it must be right"
I've noticed and known for a while that the way we do things here is no where close to how things should actually be done.
I understand how that could bite me in the ass, though. -
@scottalanmiller said in Huge Mistake:
@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:
I took a course for A+ back in Middle school, And passed. Dont remember That being Covered.
It likely wasn't. Probably because your school didn't cover all of it. And also because the A+ didn't used to have anything to do with IT, it was garbage. Then it became so famously bad that they did a LOT of work to make it at least passably useful. So the material on it now is 20x better than it used to be. Still not wonderful, but so much better.
Now it covers real networking basics, RAID, drives, etc. It's enough that we make all of our crew go through it just to make sure that they have baselines. We don't make them do the printer stuff and other things that are rarely used or applicable, and we don't make them get the examples, but it's free and trivial to go through the material, so we have them do that. And that's why I took the time to make the guide here, because that's where my team finds it.
I might not be remembering but what I took was "Cisco's IT Essentials" course, in like 2007. < Side note; Story >
Then never touched it again, at all until 2016 when I had my Accident which took me out of construction type jobs due to back problems, thats when I started looking into IT jobs more. Which is what landed me on ML to begin with -
</ Side Note: Story >
So like you said, it probably wasn't covered in School, cause it wasn't something that was taught back then .
