Having a computer glitch surprise at work is a thing which I don’t like especially if it’s on a Friday. I was intensively thinking on how to generate the data required for Web Evaluation Report which interactively gives the output based on unit chosen. Anyway, I was rushing to finish the it using PL/SQL Developer.

I have created some stored procedures which would accept parameters for use with the web application. Upon compilation PL/SQL Developer popped up an error box. The error throws ORA-01034: ORACLE not available, but interesting to note is the other error ORA-27101: shared memory realm does not exist. Further, there’s a Linux Error: 2: No such file or directory.

I did think too much about the error at first, thinking it was only a network problem. I tried to login again, but the error persisted. Quick check on the Linux database server showed that one of the RAID hard disk have an orange led lit which indicates hardware trouble.

The hard disk failed and the whole /u02 partition which host the Oracle database could not be mounted. It’s not recognized by the system. Whew! I am going nuts as all the work that was done on that day was gone. Even there’s a regular daily server data backup, but it was done every evening only. This reminds everyone of the importance of having regular backup of data.

A new disk was installed to replace the broken one while data recovery was tried using fschk. The file system check command could not repair the disk due to bad superblock error. Thus, the whole partition could not be mounted. The weekend was not really bright; thinking of the data loss for me and the entire work force application that relies on the database. It’s the worst day of the week when the database computer server failed.