Bad disks in ancient server

Get (and continue to get, daily or more frequently) good backups of the shared file data now. If you lose the machine you probably aren't going to be able to find the necessary diskettes (yep) to restore it. Get a copy of the DOS partition that Netware boots out of, if possible, too.

That sounds like an Adaptec AAA-131 RAID card (or something of that era). If I'm right you're not going to find much better management software because none exists (see http://www.adaptec.com/en-us/downloads/novell_netware/novell_netware/productid=aaa-131&dn=aaa-131.html for the last available versions). I used a lot of those cards "back in the day" and they worked okay.

If it is a AAA-131 be exeedingly careful when playing with its configuration. There is no way to configure a RAID set w/o wiping the disks on those cards. That means, for example, if you take the box down and attach some test disks and, say, clear the configuration and make a RAID set on them, when you plug the "production" disks back in there will be no way to use them without the card formatting them first. Yeah. It's that bad.

Novell Netware will run in the VMware hypervisors. I'd recommend contracting with somebody who has decent Novell Netware experience (there are people on here-- I'm looking at you, Sysadmin1138-- who have it) to help you get the contents of the server moved into a virtual environment where, at least, you can keep it going.

If your clients computers are modern and have a Microsoft networking client installed you might find that migrating to a Windows Server-based machine would actually be quick and easy. Bring the Windows Server machine up with the same name as the Netware server, expose a shared directory structure with the same UNC naming convention as the Netware machine, copy all the files over, and duplicate the permissions on the destination machine (by hand). It might not be all that difficult to do and you could "stage" the migration in a test lab beforehand and test some clients with it to decide what needs to be changed from a script / user environment perspective.

You can probably get some spare hardware from eBay. Anything you buy of that vintage, though, is going to have reliability problems, too.

If I were you, I'd be getting somebody good with Windows Server in there to help you stage a migration away from that box NOW. The case can probably be made to management to spend some money giving that you could lose the entire contents of the Netware box at virtually any time. The replacement box wouldn't need massive horsepower (given what you're replacing) so software licensing and backup would be your biggest costs. Client-related migration issues could be minimized by using a consultant who is good w/ scripting and can plan for the details of changing client-related settings thru logon and startup scripts.

I know, because I've done it (Hi Evan), that VMWare does have decent NetWare support. Even for the really old stuff (what you're running). NetWare of that vintage NOOPs the CPU when idle instead of HALTing it, so whatever CPU it is given in a VM will be pegged. This is what the VMWare Tools are for, they make it not do that. VMWare has been around since the 90's (and even has had a booth at BrainShare for several years) and has had to do it, this is why they have support. Microsoft's virtualization is new enough that they've never had to virtualize NetWare, so it doesn't work there.

If this server is as critical as you say, springing for some VMWare licenses should be an easy sell. At minimum, spring for a VMWare Workstation license, which will at least get this server into a virtual environment. VMWare Server is free (I believe) if you really have to. Once that job's done, you can consider moving it to something like ESXi until it can be more formally replaced.

There are other options, depending on your Linux skills. Novell has spent quite some time getting Xen (not KVM, Xen, though both use qemu) to support NetWare. It probably will work with NW3.12, though you'll need to be sure you use full virtualization mode, not paravirtualization.

That server is new enough it should have a CD-ROM drive in it, which will probably be your saving grace. Once you get your backup done, boot it to an ISO-Linux if your choice. It won't be able to get at the data, but it should see the hard-drive. At that point, do a complete dd copy of both volumes to somewhere else on your network. Those drive images can be used directly by qemu as virtual drives.

There are ways to convert dd-generated images into VMware VMDK's, but I haven't used them myself. Google them, they're out there.

• P2V newer NetWare versions, from BrainShare. Most of this should still apply to NW3.12
• Another step-by-step, this time using CloneZilla and a few other free tools. Doesn't require installing NetWare, though will require hand editing the STARTUP.NCF and AUTOEXEC.NCF files. Depending on your NetWare-fu, you may want help for that.

This isn't really helpful in terms of your question (quite frankly you already HAVE spares, and the only useful suggestion I have for sourcing vintage disks would be "Feed the drive model numbers to Google Shopping"), but before you touch anything else you should really MAKE DAMN SURE YOU HAVE A GOOD BACKUP AND CAN SUCCESSFULLY RESTORE IT TO A NEW MACHINE IN A USABLE STATE.

If this machine is as critical as it sounds from your description that should be your zeroth priority right now. If you haven't done a successful restore test on your backups in a while you should assume they're worthless, and you need to ensure that you can actually recover should this machine wheeze its last and die on you.
If another disk drops dead on you and you have no usable backups that's pretty much the ballgame. You'll be moving to your new system immediately, whether you're ready or not.

Just my $3.50.

Others have already addressed backups, etc., so I won't repeat any of that. There are a couple of things you can do to improve your chances of the system continuing to function.

Start by investing in a really good quality line filter and place that between the UPS and the server. Those old drives will by now be rather touchy about surges, spikes and even fairly small supply fluctuations.

I see from you update that you have already installed the spare drives but this is what I would have recommended: Before trying the spare drives in the server put them in another machine and stress the crap out of them with burn-in software or, if you can't get hold of that, continuous test cycles using regular drive test software. Keep that up for at least a few days before declaring the drives trustworthy. Old drives that have been in storage are notoriously unreliable and can fail at the drop of a hat.

Excellent suggestions up above. Try this also - on spare modern hardware, try doing a recovery of the whole system from your last full backup. Make sure the spare machine isn't on the network.

What's that, I fear you might say? You don't have backups and/or a restore procedure? Well, now you know what you're working on for the next week?