WHS primary drive failed, now what?

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KevinG

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 21, 2003
Messages
348
My WHS consists of a 500gig "primary" drive, and two 2TB drives as part of the storage pool.

The "primary" drive started getting errors, and eventually the server would freeze after being up for a few minutes.

I had mirroring turned on for almost everything, so my data likely spans all three of these drives.

I've replaced the 500gig, and re-installed WHS. After that was complete, I reconnected my two 2TB drives (the old primary drive is set aside for now).

So, here's the question. Can I somehow convince the new installation to recognize the 2 TB drives as being part of the pool without formatting them? If not, how am I supposed to get the system back to a good state without buying new 2TB drives to migrate the data to?

Thanks for any insight!
-Kevin
 
You should have left the 2TB drives connected and done a server "Reinstall". That's the WHS option for recovering after a primary drive failure. It still recognizes your data pool, minus what was one the failed primary drive, which these days, shouldn't be much.

I think you can probably still do a reinstall. Boot from the WHS install disk with the 2TB drives connected and see if it gives you a reinstall option. I've done this once and it was successful. Maybe somebody else can elaborate further.
 
Ah, so even though the primary disk was blank, it would have seen the other disks and understood that I wanted to do a "Reinstall". I only disconnected them to protect them from being wiped. :)

So the question now is can I do a "reinstall" with this newly installed drive, or should I wipe it first?
 
I think you can do the reinstall without wiping the new primary first. Just tread lightly when going through the install. You should be able to tell when you get to the point that one more click will format you pool drives. If you get there and you haven't seen the reinstall option, then you have a descision to make. I don't exactly remember where the reinstall option is in the process.
 
vectravl400 said:
Seems like this would be a good topic for the sticky whs questions thread.
Click to expand...

Just let them know you didn't look through all the pages because this has been explained in there already. That thread would be more than happy to pick up on it or at least redirect you to the pages it was explained on. (I am not sure which pages it was on either or I would link, sorry)
 
Kevin,
It will still work

All you need to to do is connect all your drives.
Insert CD
Boot from CD
Choose the "Repair" or "Reinstall" option and let it do its thing. Just make sure you dont choose "new installation.

Have fun
 
It didn't work.

It offered the "reinstall" option, which I did. It definitely had all of my drives listed as well.

Except, when the install was finished, both of the 2TB drives still weren't part of the pool, and my only option was to format them to add them to the pool...Obviously, I didn't do that.

My only try at this point is to wipe the new 500 gig and try a fresh re-install with all drives connected...
 
Your OS drive needs to be clean to do the reinstall.

Because you had an instance on there it used the drive meta data stored on the OS drive(from your clean install) to tell it what the storage pool was.
 
I removed the two partitions from the drive, and I'm in the process of doing another "reinstall".

Half way through, the DVD rom drive failed (or the DVD is bad). I'm trying it again with another DVD (Blu-Ray actually) drive. When it rains, it pours.
 
The DVD drive was bad. So the reinstall worked this time...

And, even more importantly than that...it also recovered all of the data.

Thanks for the pointers!

So, some follow up. To repeat, the system had been 500 gig primary, two 2TB drives for data. Of course, that primary drive had about 480gigs available to the storage pool as well. I'm thinking that, since I had duplication on, there shouldn't be anything on that 480 gig partition that *isn't* on one of the other 2TB drives. I assume that it will figure out that some of the data on the 2TB drives is no longer mirrored elsewhere, and will do that on it's own?

Thanks again.
-Kevin
 
Make sure your folders are still have duplication turned on, and WHS will take care of it.
 
Actually, not that I've had some time with it...

Although it has recovered all of the data, and I can see all of it...I don't have permissions to access any of it...and that is while logged in as administrator at the console...

Any thoughts on how to fix that?
 
Thanks.

I've tried that. And now that you've forwarded me the explicit instructions I've followed them again. No change. In fact, the current owner is listed as:

Administrator (SERVER\Administrator)

The choices are:
Administrator (SERVER\Administrator)
Administrators (SERVER\Administrators)

and I've tried both of the choices. No difference in behavior. Any other thoughts?
 
did you check the box that says Replace owner on subcontainers and objects
 
Its definitley and NTFS permissions issue, if you are doing this from remote desktop.

also you can try this registry file.
It will allow you to right click a folder in explorer (not a network share but the actual D:\folders)
and it will take ownership.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00


[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\runas]
@="Take Ownership"
"NoWorkingDirectory"=""

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\runas\command]
@="cmd.exe /c takeown /f \"%1\" && icacls \"%1\" /grant administrators:F"
"IsolatedCommand"="cmd.exe /c takeown /f \"%1\" && icacls \"%1\" /grant administrators:F"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\runas]
@="Take Ownership"
"NoWorkingDirectory"=""

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\runas\command]
@="cmd.exe /c takeown /f \"%1\" /r /d y && icacls \"%1\" /grant administrators:F /t"
"IsolatedCommand"="cmd.exe /c takeown /f \"%1\" /r /d y && icacls \"%1\" /grant administrators:F /t"
Click to expand...
 
Yes, I clicked the box to tell it to do the job on the children. Also saw a box come up to tell me which objects it was taking ownership of. I'm not doing this via remote desktop...I'm on the console of the machine itself.

I agree that it is NTFS permissions causing the problem...just can't figure a way out of it!

I'll try the reg. hack.
 
I haven't tried the reg hack yet...but does this information help at all?

I *can't* run \\Server\Public\Foo\Bar.exe

but I *can* run d:\shares\Public\Foo\Bar.exe

shouldn't the permissions be the same?

For completeness sake, the exact error is:

"Windows cannot access the specified device, path or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the item"

Thanks again.
 
reg hack didn't work either...or rather, it went off and did a whole bunch of work, but it had no apparent effect. :-(
 
KevinG said:
I *can't* run \\Server\Public\Foo\Bar.exe

but I *can* run d:\shares\Public\Foo\Bar.exe

shouldn't the permissions be the same?
Click to expand...

Quoting myself here, but does this scenario make sense to anyone?
 
Sure does. The first one relys on both ntfs and share settings for permissions, but the second one only uses the ntfs permissions. Your share permissions are probably set to 'Read Only' instead of 'Change' or 'Full Control'. 'Change' would probably be the most appropriate one.
 
No, something much worse is going on, and I just can't figure out WTF it is.

Now I can't execute a different executable from d:\shares. I copied it to the c:\ drive and it's the same problem.

Tried right clicking and "take ownership" reg hack on that directory...it did the work, but I still get that same error when I double click on the exe.

On the exe: right click, properties, security: Adminitrators has "full control", Authenitcated Users has Read & Execute. If I "add..." Administrator (even though it's a member of the Administrators group) and give it full control, Apply, Ok...and the same problem persists.

Go through Advanced, owner, and set the owner to Administrators (it was already at Adminstrator, since I used the take ownership reg hack) and there is no difference...WTF!?
 
WHS sure makes a great backup system :rolleyes:
Wish I could help, but I gave up on WHS when it failed to recover drives several times for different reasons.

The only known solution to fix my backups was to remove the backupDB and then create a new backup.

Is this data your trying to recover part of the BackupDB or simply on shares? I'd assume it is on the shares since you were talking about replication. If thats the case then I'm having second thoughts on using WHS as a media server, as I have already given up on it as an automated backup server...
 
Last edited:
Justintoxicated said:
WHS sure makes a great backup system :rolleyes:
Is this data your trying to recover part of the BackupDB or simply on shares? I'd assume it is on the shares since you were talking about replication. If thats the case then I'm having second thoughts on using WHS as a media server, as I have already given up on it as an automated backup server...
Click to expand...

It's the shares. I was comfortable with loosing all of my computer backups. I figured I'd just force a backup on each one, and understand that I had lost the history.

This is complete garbage at this point.

I went to the local security settings and gave my own private login permission to logon locally. Logged out of the Administrator accout, and logged back in as myself.

Same problem. Okay, right click, add myself to the "users", and give full access (should I have been able to even do that? That was surprising). So, here I am at the desktop, with supposedly "full access" to this executable file...and I get that same damn error message.

This leaves my WHS almost completely useless...I can't install any drivers, I can't install python, I can't install uTorrent, I can't install pyTivo, I can't install sabnzbd...since I don't have "permission" on any of those files...garbage. It was great while it worked...but now it's completely hosed.
 
As a last ditch effort, I did yet another reinstall, this time using XFiles Edition – Server Installation v1.5.5

It fixed everything. Well, at least before it went off and started downloading and installing the 55 or so updates, I was able to access everything as expected...We'll see if that's still the case after the "updates" have been installed.
 
**BUSTED**

One of the 25 (not 55) updates from MS completely break my homeserver.

I'm now doing a reinstall again, and wont let it install all of the updates. I'll go through them one by one to find the culprit.

Can anyone suggest a way to roll it back once I find it?
 
Well, if anyone ever digs this thread up, it might as well have the final details.

Upon reinstall I was only presented with 9 updates. I took all of them except internet explorer 8. The problem didn't resurface.

A few other problems did, though.

Upon every boot I get a warning that at least one device or service failed to start and to check the Event Log for details...however, there's no failure noted in the event log...so I have no clue what it is, and everything seems to be working.

X-Files 1.5.5 must have included drivers for my emu-0404, but unfortunately they didn't work, and they were somehow marked as newer than the newest ones available...so it was near impossible to get them off of there so that I could reinstall working ones. Took most of the day to get that one figured out.

In the end, it's all working again (and I'm okay with ignoring that startup error, since I'll very rarely be restarting the system anyway), but I can honestly say that I'm finished with recommending WHS for anyone else. This was a completely unacceptable situation for a system that is supposed to *protect* me from having to deal with issues like this in the first place...

Hopefully they will address this in the next version?
 
KevinG said:
Upon every boot I get a warning that at least one device or service failed to start and to check the Event Log for details...however, there's no failure noted in the event log...so I have no clue what it is, and everything seems to be working.
Click to expand...

I get that also on my WHS..and like you..I dont reboot it all to often..so its just an annoyance. not worth looking into. unless easily fixxed.
 
Justintoxicated said:
WHS sure makes a great backup system :rolleyes:
Wish I could help, but I gave up on WHS when it failed to recover drives several times for different reasons.

The only known solution to fix my backups was to remove the backupDB and then create a new backup.

Is this data your trying to recover part of the BackupDB or simply on shares? I'd assume it is on the shares since you were talking about replication. If thats the case then I'm having second thoughts on using WHS as a media server, as I have already given up on it as an automated backup server...
Click to expand...

That is unfortunate that it did not work out for you. WHS has saved my bacon more than once when it came to recovering whole computers or single files. It has also been a beautiful streaming device for my ever growing collection of media files.
 
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