Albert Sodyl wrote to WILL HONEA on 10-18-1999

AS> Well thanks a lot, I'll keep that in mind, it actually took me
AS> over 1 hour restoring my 200 megs from floppies after formatting
AS> with HPFS. 

You get no sympathy from me today.  I spent all night recovering 5
Warp Server setups that or LAN Admin had been, shall we say, lax about
maintaining.  I also re-learned a lesson about fixpaks the hard way.

As a reminder to everyone:  the instructions for applying fixpaks
include an admonition to run chkdsk before applying.  DO IT!  Scenario
was that we had to deploy an application update which ran against these
5 servers.  New app server code crashed and then I discovered that the
admin worked under the philosophy that 'never fixpak a working
machine'.  Hence, 5 Warp Server Advanced SMP installations still at GA
level.  D/l the fixpak via RSU to one server, net use the d/l drive out
to the other servers and start them all updating.  4 of the 5
completed, no problem.  Number 5 hung during application installation. 
After trying everything else, I forced a chkdsk on the next boot and
every drive had errors.  It took until sunrise to restore that one
system - with it's 48 gig raid array.

Sometimes I'm a bit sloppy, but this lesson will stick.  When applying
fixpaks, have a good backup, run chkdsk first.  And for those of you
still wanting HPFS386, be forewarned that recovery of drives with
HPFS386 installed is very dicey - ranging from a real PITA to
impossible!

Will Honea 
--- Maximus/2 2.02