Switch from WSE 2012 to WHS 2011?

J

Justintoxicated

[H]F Junkie
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So I had not yet activated my WSE2012, I was still in the process of attaining a hard drive to test out the backup feature.

I have spent several hours configuring the system to do everything I wanted. It was pretty painful to get all the user account privilages, add ins etc installed and working correctly. I spent about a month and 1/2 (working on it over weekends mostly).

Today I come home and I can't connect to the server so I flip on the monitor and notice it is frozen on the bios screen.

So I reboot it and get an error that there are no system drive that can be detected. I tried to do a restore using the installer but it can't find any system images.

So what now? Do I have to re-install everything from scratch? I really don't know if my system can be trusted now and I can't believe that it just crapped out like that while I wasn't even home. Any way to restore this system I really really don't want to waste another month of my life trying to figure out all this stuff again?

The drive it was installed on is a 160GB Intel SSD.

Would WHS 2011 going to be any more stable than this because WSE was a super pain to setup, it felt like it was one issue to resolve after the next after the next after the next and I really don't want to go through it all again, it was not easy at all. I'm not sure I want to invest $400 into an OS that can vanish without any warnings, and that is so difficult to configure. I need some advice. I think my data should still be on the Stablebits storage pool but I am unsure how difficult it will be to recover it.
 
It sounds like either the SSD died, is having issues, or the mobo is having issues (SATA controller, SATA port) or even possibly the SATA cable or power cable to the SSD?
Does the BIOS even detect the SSD?

The OS is completely irrelevant to hardware issues.

I haven't toyed with WHS 2011, but the original WHS was extremely simple.
 
j-sta said:
It sounds like either the SSD died, is having issues, or the mobo is having issues (SATA controller, SATA port) or even possibly the SATA cable or power cable to the SSD?
Does the BIOS even detect the SSD?

The OS is completely irrelevant to hardware issues.

I haven't toyed with WHS 2011, but the original WHS was extremely simple.
Click to expand...

I'm thinking WHS 2011 might get the job does although I really wanted one or two the features WSE had, like being able to backup more than 5 computers or whatever limitation it had. I don't need a real business server though, and I found the Win8 style interface clunky and hard to adjust to, especially when trying to learn how to get to server parts of the OS that I'm already not familiar with (I don't work on Windows Server 2008 daily). It seemed to be rock solid though, where I have been having to constantly reboot the WHSV1 lately, and it has always tended to hang to where I can't RDP which causes me to hard power it off and on (no monitor connected to it). But it's an extremely old install as well and was handling way more drives than it was designed for.

As for the SSD I will try to find out more tonight assuming I get home before 11:00 and have to go to bed right away again.

To make matters worse, my Hard drive with years of photos decided to die on my office PC and I no longer have servers to offload them too. I did copy them over right before WSE crashed but I have no idea how to recover the Stable Bits storage pool yet, as I haven't found a way to get the PC to boot up.

I have tried changing cables and sockets on the MB and it doe snot help. The SSD is detected by the bios it's just that the bootable section of the drive seems to be missing. Last week I had one hiccup where we were streaming video off the server to the HTPC and suddenly everything disconnected, I went into the office and tried to connect from the office PC and it too could not connect. Then 5 minutes later it was as if nothing had happened, all connections restored, video started streaming again. I thought it might have been an issue with my router, but now I'm thinking it may have been the hard drive. Unfortunately nothing was recorded in the even logs when this happened...

So basically I have a server that will no longer boot, and a bad storage drive in my client that is dying, an old WHS server that is still running my security camera software that also have a backup of most of what was on the WSE2012 server. I need to remove some drives from the WHS box to replace the bad drive on the office PC but I can no longer do that because I can't transfer the data to the WSE PC due to the OS suddenly missing, assuming I even have the time to do these things!

My reason for thinking to try WHS 2011 instead is so I don't have to sit on my ass in front of the server for another 40 hours configuring the WSE to do what I want. Certainly going to blog about it's setup next time so I can remeber WTH all the steps were and how top execute all the commands since I can never find the tools due to the clunky Win8 style / Metro looking turd of an interface.
 
I can understand migrating from WSE2012 to WHS2011 for simplicity of setup; that makes sense.
Switching because of a hardware issue does not :)

It's possible to boot the WSE off the install disc, attempt a repair but cancel the auto-repair (which will most likely fail anyway, if it doesn't detect the OS partition) then run the command prompt and do a chkdsk on the SSD?
Or plug the SSD in to a different machine, if you have something like a 5-in-1 USB adapter, and run chkdsk from there.
Could just be the partition table got corrupt. Of course if you revive it, it may still be beneficial to replace it since who knows how reliable it will be now.

I don't know about StabelBits, but it's possible it may be doing a software-type JBOD, similar to the WHS storage pool. So the data is still on the drives, and easily accessible, but not particularly organized the same way as seen through the shares.

Edit:
Here's some info regarding a StableBit DrivePool. It is similar to WHS storage pool.
http://forum.wegotserved.com/index.php/topic/29063-can-i-recover-files-from-stablebit-drivepool/
 
j-sta said:
I can understand migrating from WSE2012 to WHS2011 for simplicity of setup; that makes sense.
Switching because of a hardware issue does not :)

It's possible to boot the WSE off the install disc, attempt a repair but cancel the auto-repair (which will most likely fail anyway, if it doesn't detect the OS partition) then run the command prompt and do a chkdsk on the SSD?
Or plug the SSD in to a different machine, if you have something like a 5-in-1 USB adapter, and run chkdsk from there.
Could just be the partition table got corrupt. Of course if you revive it, it may still be beneficial to replace it since who knows how reliable it will be now.

I don't know about StabelBits, but it's possible it may be doing a software-type JBOD, similar to the WHS storage pool. So the data is still on the drives, and easily accessible, but not particularly organized the same way as seen through the shares.

Edit:
Here's some info regarding a StableBit DrivePool. It is similar to WHS storage pool.
http://forum.wegotserved.com/index.php/topic/29063-can-i-recover-files-from-stablebit-drivepool/
Click to expand...

I tried booting off the WSE disk but the only repair option is to restore from an image, there are no other repair options. There is an option to get to the command prompt but I can't seem to change to the SSD drive. There is also an option to "upgrade" teh OS instead of install it so I thought fine do that, but upgrade only works after you boot into the OS which I can't do.
 
from the command prompt, run:
wmic logicaldisk get name

That should provide you a list of all volumes currently mounted.

C:\>wmic logicaldisk get name
Name
A:
C:
D:
R:
V:
Click to expand...

You could also try running diskpart and then list disk to see if it shows the physical disk that's supposed to have the OS.

DISKPART> list disk
Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
------------ --------- ------------ ------ ----- -----
Disk 0 Online 80 GB 1024 KB
Click to expand...

Unfortunatey you can't do any kind of repairs with diskpart, but it will at least help you determine if Windows even detects the physical drive.
 
How difficult is it to manage WSE 2012 as a media server? I'm assuming all client pc's need to be added to a domain and need to install the connector.

I'm in the process of resuing an older pc as a media server and need to choose an OS. Is there any real advantage to using WSE 2012 (I have licenses) over plain Win 7/8. I don't plan to use any disk pooling/RAID features, for that I'll likely be using FlexRaid.
 
you can install the connector without joining the domain.

Turns out that there is a bug in the Intel 320 drives where you can unexpectedly just lose all data and end up with a 8MB harddrive. The fix it so use secure erase to wipe the drive. So now I'm re-installing WSE.

The fix for the bug was to update the firmware, but I don't remember now if I updated to the latest before or after I lost all data. I think I may have already had the latest firmware. Really a bummer because now I have to figure everything out again.
 
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