Data recovery from Windows Home Server disks, anyone got any pointerss?

S

Sikpupi

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 13, 2003
Messages
382
Ok basically I was reinstalling the server (after 1 year 24/7) and I got the nice option of reinstallation. Obviously I chose that option and everything proceeded just normal. Right up to the last stage where setup crashed creating volume c:

It gave me some error about "error in external hardware", I retried a couple of times but it really wasn't interested. So I removed the disks and took them to another PC. Expecting to see the \\DE\folders tree instead I was greeted with the message that my disk needs to be formatted before use.

So I opened R-Studio and put it to scan the disk, 6 hours later it finds lots of folders (about 80) called "recognised files" some are NTFS some are FAT and FAT32. When I click on a folder it takes another few minutes and then I see the files in the folder, as of now I can only find really basic stuff seeming left over from the disks previous life in my desktop (command.com, io.sys etc)

Can anyone offer any pointers on what to look for? I'm really not bothered about the old stuff, I just need a couple of family videos out of there.

What file system does the storage pool use? Has anyone successfully recovered a crashed WHS disk using R-Studio?

Thanks for any help.

Paul.
 
why did you need to reload WHS

due to vista been annoying with security (if not goto safe mode if you do not have XP pc) or do this on XP (if you not got XP pro you may have to goto save mode to set security permissions )
set the computer to show hidden and system files as well as Protected files show

goto disk management and set an Drive letter on the hard disk that you have put in your pc, the other disks has the data in them, the first disk that you may have formatted has two partitions on it if you wipe the first one thats not so bad if the second partition is wiped you lost all mount point entries and you have to mount each disk on an pc and give it an drive letter so you can see it, all your data will still be there

i not recommend WHS yet as if the system drive fails its an real big pain to get the files back off the drives as the data partition (is where the location info that points to the other disks in the WHS) is on the system drive as we, so if it fails you can likely lose data an little or waste alot of time having to get all the files back into folders
 
greenfrogman said:
i not recommend WHS yet as if the system drive fails its an real big pain to get the files back off the drives as the data partition (is where the location info that points to the other disks in the WHS) is on the system drive as we, so if it fails you can likely lose data an little or waste alot of time having to get all the files back into folders
Click to expand...

This is simply not true. Your share pointers and permissions are managed by the main system drive, but all data on the pool drives are independent and accessible from any system. You can pull a live drive and access all the files on another system without any problems.
 
once you have add/mounted an drive letter to the drive (sure folder names are not preserved end up in some random named folders, looked like that last time i played with WHS i have to play with it again)

main reason i have not used WHS on my main server as the data partition cant be made redundant (last time i checked as it cant be installed onto an raid 1 drive {i tried}) so if the system/data hard disk Fails you have to faf around a lot to get the data back to where you want it

i love to use home server as it would relay make it far easier to place all my files (or i could just do RAID 5 but the data is not that important just take me 1-3 weeks to download 3TB again)

i have to set it up again in VMware see how its setup again
 
greenfrogman said:
once you have add/mounted an drive letter to the drive (sure folder names are not preserved end up in some random named folders, looked like that last time i played with WHS i have to play with it again)

main reason i have not used WHS on my main server as the data partition cant be made redundant (last time i checked as it cant be installed onto an raid 1 drive {i tried}) so if the system/data hard disk Fails you have to faf around a lot to get the data back to where you want it

i love to use home server as it would relay make it far easier to place all my files (or i could just do RAID 5 but the data is not that important just take me 1-3 weeks to download 3TB again)

i have to set it up again in VMware see how its setup again
Click to expand...

You can set the main drive on a Raid 1 array, it depends how you have implemented your array.
 
Or use imaging software like Acronis that backs your system drive up onto another drive every so often.
 
RAID1 system drives are definitely possible, considering I just did that after my main OS drive crashed. I had to download the motherboard RAID drivers (since I am using the onboard SATA controllers for the OS drives) but I've now got the system running on two 250 GB drives in a RAID1 setup.

As Ockie mentioned, the data should be visible from any other computer that you connect the drives to since it writes the data to the drives in NTFS format. To me it sounds like you might have accidentally selected the Install option instead of Reinstall, which will wipe the data from any drives connected. Of course, when my OS drive crashed I couldn't even select that option for some reason, so all my data drives were disconnected when I did a reinstall.
 
farscapesg1 said:
when my OS drive crashed I couldn't even select that option for some reason, so all my data drives were disconnected when I did a reinstall.
Click to expand...

That's the pits. I had to do the same thing, which meant shuffling data around to empty a disk so I could add it to the storage. What a pain.
 
Vague said:
That's the pits. I had to do the same thing, which meant shuffling data around to empty a disk so I could add it to the storage. What a pain.
Click to expand...

Had to do this twice in three weeks, I had a motherboard failure then a hdd failure right after another.

REALLY ANNOYING.

Stupid reinstall option didn't show itself.

Took days to move around 4ish TB of data.
 
Yep... a major PITA :mad: On top of that I think there was some data on the system drive that I lost. It wasn't important data (that was all set up with duplication), but I'm still trying to figure out exactly what was lost. For example, I have a couple movie folders that don't have anything in them, but I don't know which ones until I open the folder... and I don't really have time to go through every folder to see what might be missing.

At least I should be a little more protected with RAID1 now. I even have a couple spare 250 GB drives sitting around in case I loose one. At least I'm glad that others have had the issue with not getting a "reinstall" option. Others act like I am crazy or just blind that the option didn't show itself...
 
I had a mobo die on me, and the reinstall option did not show up no matter what I did.
About one day after I had shuffled around 9tb of data back to WHS, I had System Drive corruption, and could not boot. Reinstall didnt show either.

I'm not sure what the deal lately has been? I used to reinstall at least once a month because I would try to make WHS do things its not really supposed to and would bork my windows install and start over. But now I just want it to work without fucking up.
 
Hi guys,

Well I discovered EASEUS Drive recovery wizard, I scanned one of my TB disks and it found pretty much everything on there. Recovery for one TB disk (600gb full) from start to finish takes around 10 hours. Therefore I haven't had time to try with the other disks but hopefully they will be the same story.
 
This is an area where WHS could stand to be beefed up.

The metadata should be replicated to other disks in the system; as it is, WHS really doesn't have a true backup and recovery capability for itself---just for the files it manages. The architecture and use of the first physical disk that contains a system and data partition has to be overhauled; it is a single point of failure that, short of turning into a physical mirror, you can't do anything about.

I did some tests and ran into the same issue: when the MB goes, reinstall is no longer an option.
 
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