IMaxtor Central Axis Egg Storage
I’ve always been fairly paranoid about my data storage, so I don’t know why I felt so inclined to trust Maxtor’s Central Axis Data Server with all my files. Maybe it was because I was impressed with the notion that that tiny cute little box held a Terabyte of storage and a Linux server, and would be replacing a huge rackmount server and a RAID array of disk drives that I’d been using without a hitch for years. It was fairly inexpensive, fairly easy to set up, didn’t cost much, and for the past 6 months seemed to be fairly reliable. It even has a USB port that you can plug another Terabyte drive into and schedule automatic backups or even mirroring, but (ahem) I never quite got around to that. So I should first take full responsibility for knowingly putting all my eggs in one basket.
As you might imagine, everything was fine until the thing’s Ethernet port quit working. The unit powers up and boots and gives healthy status indications, but the ethernet port is dead, deaf, and dumb. And I can’t get to any of my precious data eggs!
Not much you can do about that. It was beyond its warranty, and besides, near as I can tell if you want to try to get some satisfaction from Maxtor - um, they sold out to Seagate, didn’t they?
Of course when you find yourself in this situation and go googling for dead Maxtor Central Axis you find out that you’re Not Alone. But never fear, the blogosphere has the answer, right?
Sure, just remove the drive and stick it in a Linux box and voila, there’s your data! Right!?
Well, I’m here to tell you, it ain’t that easy!
Its amazing what modern manufacturing can accomplish these days - molded plastic pieces that fit together so seamlessly you can’t figure out how they ever put it together, much less how to get it apart! But I finally did it. And early on I realized there were so Continue reading "Getting Back Your Eggs" →




