Well, I thought I was done with the disk scrubbing, but I ran into a snag. Drive Cleanser 6 managed to clean the two partitions that were smaller than 2 TB, but reported space on the 5.45 TB partition as 1.46 TB. I called Acronis tech support, and they said that DC6 wasn’t supported on any Windows Server release after 2003. “Let me get this straight,” I said to the tech. “The most current Server release you support is nine years old?” He said that was right, but offered as an excuse the DC6 was an older product. There didn’t seem to be any purchase price discount associated with the “older product” status, I noted. The tech suggested that I use DC6 to produce a bootable disk, which he said would wipe big partitions.
The reason I went with Acronis was that I’d had good luck with other products from the company, and I’d found their support pretty good. I admit that I just looked to see if the product supported any Windows Serve release, and didn’t check on WS2008 support. Part of the reason I did this is that I’ve found lots of products that do run under WS2008 don’t say they do. Anyway, I’m complicit in this glitch.
The instructions for DC6 say: “After making your installation choices and copying of Acronis Drive Cleanser files onto your hard disk, you will be offered to create [sic] a bootable diskette or CD-R/…” Well, there’s a small problem. The server can’t write a CD. I’d have to find another machine to install DC6 on, and make a boot disk there.
It seemed simpler to start all over. I downloaded Eraser 6, a free scrubber, installed it, and let it work overnight. It called its efforts a success, but, since it never told me what size it thought the disk was, I had a nagging suspicion. I downloaded the trial version of DiskInternals UnEraser program and turned it loose on the RAID5 partition. It only found gibberish. Back to tweaking the new server.
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