Question : Failing Netware Drive?

Our company has a small, single-server network running Netware 6.5 SP6. This afternoon I got a broadcast network error message, and when I checked the logger screen on the server it reported a 'BeastTree' error on the Data volume/pool, which it appeared to have dismounted.

I rebooted the server, but it failed to mount the data volume. Having looked at similar problems in Experts Exchange and elsewhere, I unloaded everything else that could be unloaded and ran
nss /poolrepair=data. This stopped at around 44% with a message (which unfortunately I didn't write down) that the repair had encountered a problem, and if it continued around 5 megabytes of data in 7 files would be lost - presumably because they were located in bad sectors on the drive.

I cancelled the repair, then ran it again, and this time it completed successfully. I rebooted the server again, and this time all volumes loaded and everything now appears OK. As far as I can tell we haven't lost any data. However I'm worried that there may be problems with the drive, which may recur in a more catastrophic failure. I'd therefore like to know

1) what Netware utilities can I run to check the health (or otherwise) of the drive?

2) can I assume that the poolrepair utility will have detected the bad sectors and flagged them as not to be written to?

3) what else would Experts recommend I do to ensure the continued health and data integrity of our network?

Answer : Failing Netware Drive?

Obviously the first step would be to ensure you have a solid backup of the server as soon as possible. A worthwhile investment is Portlock Storage Manager. It's not expensive and is worth its weight in gold as it can image your entire server, as one would use Ghost to image a Windows PC.

The NSS verify and repair options are the best utilities for diagnosing and fixing problems with NSS pools/volumes, but utilities such as SpinRite are very useful for establishing if you do in fact have physical problems with the hard disc.

I'm sure I don't need to point out that a single disc environment is very bad news. I would always recommend an absolute minimum of RAID1 mirroring for a server whose data you consider valuable.