Previously on Fear and Loathing...

Bil was struggling with the question. What would you rather have? No source control or no tests.

Let's go back a bit to Friday morning when Bil came into the office to find himself alone (it was 5:30AM and what ungodly soul would be at work at that time?) and unable to connect to the Team Foundation Server. It seems the drive that contained the database files filled up. Oh it gets better. No only did the data drive fill up (and BTW, the data files AND log files were on the same drive, not the way I would have set things up) but (drumroll please...) no backups. Somewhere along the way the SQLAGENT was disabled and frankly, when it's disabled nothing really works, including backups. As the data drive filled up, the transaction logs filled up and eventually became corrupted, unreadable, and unrecoverable.

The short of it that I'm left with a Team Foundation Server and it's databases with no log files. Not the end of the world (at least I don't think so) and there are techniques for re-mounting a file without the associated .ldf file. Grant you, if there were any transactions in play they would be lost, but this was the morning and the drive filled up sometime throughout the night (probably during a build).

At this point we've tried a variety of things to restore the databases and strangely enough we got them all back online. All but one. TfsVersionControl is the table that (yup) holds all the source code for Team System projects. A single table that just refuses to restore. The single remount trick (which worked for all of the other databases) doesn't work for this one (of course) so we're turning to PSS to help us fix this. There are a couple of "hacks" where you rebuild the database and swap out the data, but again for some reason it won't work. The best and closest we got was getting TfsVersionControl back online, but checking a solution out (any solution) ends with an error about "downloadUrl" being null, and the checkout stops.

So tune in again tommorow as the geek suffers. We'll see how things go, but as a last ditch effort we do have the latest code on the build server (a separate box) which has the latest checkout so we technically *could* rebuild the projects, we would just lose source control history which in the grand scheme of things, isn't the worst thing in the world.