Help with fire aftermath recovery

[Redcoat]

My house had significant fire damage today. Adjacent garage (containing prized collector car) caught fire, ignited my house and two others. I did not have chance to initiate a shutdown before leaving. Both my FreeNAS boxes got wet from the copious water poured through the roof of the 93-year-old three-storey frame structure to extinguish the blaze. No fire in their locations, just lots of water. They were not immersed.

Anybody have experience drying computers out after such experience that they can share? Might the HDD's survive so that I can drop them on a new box?

Yes, unfortunately servers (main and backup) were in same structure, pending move to another building as soon as renovation finished.

Human side is that my wife and I both got out, she carrying two cats she managed to scoop up, then she promptly turned around and ran back up to the second floor where she had last seen the third cat. I had to pull her back down 4 flights in thick smoke to get her out (without the cat). Please don't ever take such a risk and go back in - the choking effect and visibility reduction of the smoke is to be experienced to be believed. Thankfully we did later find a very wet and frightened little cat in the basement when we were allowed back in the building once the fire was out.

Any advice on how to treat the boxes or, more importantly the HDD's, to maximize the possibility of re-importing their pools will be most welcome.

 

[ethereal]

sorry about the fire.

i don't have experience in wet servers but your idea of putting the drives in a new system is what i would try first
does your raidzs have redundacy in case not all the hdds survived ?

 

[Redcoat]

sorry about the fire.

i don't have experience in wet servers but your idea of putting the drives in a new system is what i would try first
does your raidzs have redundacy in case not all the hdds survived ?

Yes, both pools were raid z2.

 

[Scareh]

I honestly wouldn't bother much with the existing servers for the next few weeks.
I would let everything dry out excessively. Better to wait a few more weeks/days to increase your success chances.

FOr the hard disks, thats a different story. There i would suggest going to old rice method ;-). If it works on the electronics on cellphones it shouldn't do much damage to your hard disks.


Happy to hear you got out safely, thats in the end the most important bit

 

[Jailer]

That's terrible news but I'm glad to hear you both made it out safely.

Let everything dry out for a while before you do anything at all with it. As @ethereal said, the rice trick for the hard drives would be a good idea.

 

[melloa]

Glad you are OK.

The disks inside the hard drives are probably fine, the only concern would be the electronics. As they were on, there is a possibility that they shorted with the water and got damaged some how.

Try to do what @ethereal and @Jailer mentioned above, but be patient. Allow a week for the humidity be absorbed from the disks and try them on a new setup. After you have one pool recovered, you can concentrate on identifying what, from the old servers, are still working.

 

[dak180]

Anybody have experience drying computers out after such experience that they can share? Might the HDD's survive so that I can drop them on a new box?

I have put HDDs that have had water and coffee damage through tekdry and had them come out working (I would not trust them long term after that though), so if you can find a location near you that is what I would do.