Post-Tornadic Stress on some PCs...any pointers?

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Generaluser45

Limp Gawd
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Feb 7, 2006
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I'm sure many of you in the US have seen it on the news, but a bunch of tornados went through Missouri and Illinois. According to the Springfield, IL mayor, it looks like the aftermath of Katrina.

Well...other than being damned tired from the tornado sirens at 3:25 this morning, where I live has nothing to show for it other than a bunch of nightcrawlers in the driveway.

But, one of the locations my company owns wasn't so lucky. (Said location was about 3 miles fron Springfield)

The roof was blown off one of the offices, and 5 PCs were apparantly rained on.

I'm not sure what has been done to them so far, I just know that I'm getting tasked with testing them out once they get shipped here (the location will be shut down for a few weeks while it's being repaired).

So, what pointers do you guys have for data preservation? It'll be a few days until I see the systems, so there's no immediate precautions that I can take. The first thing I plan on doing is unplugging the hdd before powering on. I don't care if we blow a motherboard or CPU or PSU...but I would like to retain the hdds (as they haven't had a network backup in about 7 months). But, if there's anything special you guys would suggest...let me know.


Figure: monitors, towers, printers, etc. are affected. Any pointers that result in either 1. Data recovery and/or 2. Me not dying due to shit blowing up...let me know.
 
If the PC's were not powered on, they may be 100% recoverable. Just give them time to dry out before powering on. Same can be said for the printers and other electronics, if they had no power prior to getting wet, they should be fine.

I would just disassemble the PC's and let a fan blow dry them. Then put back together and turn on. Good luck and let us know how it goes. Hopefully none of your folks were hurt.

(From Decatur originally, those damn tornado sirens can waken the dead.)

 
zoobaby said:
If the PC's were not powered on, they may be 100% recoverable. Just give them time to dry out before powering on. Same can be said for the printers and other electronics, if they had no power prior to getting wet, they should be fine.

I would just disassemble the PC's and let a fan blow dry them. Then put back together and turn on. Good luck and let us know how it goes. Hopefully none of your folks were hurt.

(From Decatur originally, those damn tornado sirens can waken the dead.)
Click to expand...

I'm in Decatur(as a former resident, I'll give you 3 guesses where I work), so I know how those sirens go. Especially with one not a block away from the house.



As far as the PCs go, apparantly the place was shut down for the weekend, and the PCs were off, so we're hoping for the best.
 
Generaluser45 said:
As far as the PCs go, apparantly the place was shut down for the weekend, and the PCs were off, so we're hoping for the best.
Click to expand...


Have fun getting them dry :D
 
Just how important is the data? Even if the drive electronics were completely blown, there are data recovery companies out there which you can outsource to whom can pull the data off them. Since they were powered down I seriously doubt the drive platters were physically damaged. Did you have good surge protection equipment? I lived in Oklahoma for a while, and I lost a computer due to a tornadoe related lightening strike.
 
From the way you're describing it, sounds more like just cosmetic damage and waiting for the PCs to dry out before you power 'em on. Hopefully there was no electrical damage inflicted.
 
not expensive enough to get data recovery involved. Basically it's a matter of it making our lives easier. Odds are pretty damned good that we'll be able to at least salvage the data, if not working systems themselves. If we can pull off the server, we're set for our database recovery. Other than that, it's customer files that can be pulled off the backup (I just realized that the backup for the server should be complete as of Friday; the incomplete ones were slaves that didn't host the DB.).


as far as surge protection, I believe it is standard for all systems going out to have an APC 800 or 650 connected to them, although I do NOT believe the UPS software is installed to perform a safe shutdown. I've not been to the location, so I don't really know what they have...but since it said all their systems had been upgraded to 2.4ghz Celerons...that's the last generation of in-house builds....after that we went Dell. We have plenty of the whiteboxes to play around with in our setup room...so testing things out should be simple enough.
 
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