I've had to rearrange my workload to accommodate one of those things that happens at one time or another to everyone who uses a computer ... a crash. The web server suddenly kicked it the other night with no warning. Near as me and my trusty cohort (DP) can tell something went wrong with the hard drive. The error seemed to be with the controller initially (it kept complaining about the nvram), but placing the drive in a new machine has shown it to have faulty hardware. Unfortunately the drive, while on a raid controller, was not part of an array.
Luckily the web site has plenty of backups between the staging site, the development site, and the daily tape backup. We were able to load the files on a new server within minutes. Unfortunately, though the new server was going to eventually take over as the web server eventually, it hadn't yet been set up. DP and I spent a few hours getting the bare minimum running. I haven't had much time to create documentation for the site set-up so I'm having to do everything by memory. I've been able to remember most of the necessary settings, but I am having to do a bit of trouble-shooting at the same time. I'll need to spend some time writing up some documentation in the near future in case something like this happens again.
