Dell engineer has replaced the Autoloader but as far as making backup's is concerned that is still got to be tested. But at the moment we have made sure that the Autoloader works fine in terms of loading and unloading tapes to the tape drive.
Next step would have been to set up the Veritas software to do backup's but one of the mission critical servers broke down and we had to look at that as priority1.
This is Dell Server 2003 which is very crucial box as used to support one of the major clients. It failed to reboot. Martin identified the problem trying to connect to it remotely. When he couldn't he asked us to have a look at it. The system did not boot up and kept coming with the message Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to reboot and the problem continued.
We first tried booting of the utility partition and ran the diagnostics. It came with errors which seemed like those for the hard drive. Then after running the custom test for hard drive it was evident that it is the hard drive failure.
First attempt was to fix it. I first used Bart's PXE to fix the hard drive partition but not to much help. Then went on to using Knoppix which is recovery tool with Linux on a CD. The system boots of the CD and is said to be capable of fixing most of the problems though not in this case. Thought of why not swap the hard drive with another machine just to make sure that it is the hard drive and nothing else than that. Put the hard drive onto another PC and same problem existed.
Last option was to try and get as much data as possible off it onto another location.