Windows home server server recovery

The first step, of course, is to physically remove the offending disk from the Windows Home Server. If possible, it is best if one is able to remove the drive from the storage pool, however if there is a massive hardware failure or the drive dropped from the WHS pool, one may need to remove the drive without going through the formal process.

I actually have a tray-less hot-swap bay on my machine to facilitate this process as it makes the installation and removal of drives very easy. Once one completes this step they can see the DE hidden folder:. A quick survey of the folders within the DE directory shows that shares contains most of the 1.

DE Shares Photos Luckily, this drive was only starting to fail, so I was able to quickly transfer data to a backup location. Here I was able to get vital tax information and work information off of the drive easily by just copying directories.

Sometimes, copying files off of a failing drive can be a futile effort. Others have virtually every file that can be salvaged of course except for the most vital. This process was as easy as transferring folders in Windows and orders of magnitude easier than recovering a RAID array drive. I will note that some drives with major mechanical or firmware problems are totally unreadable making this guide moot. If one monitors the health of their drives and removes them at the first sign of problems, one has a much higher chance of being able to move data off of the drive before it becomes a complete loss.

Easy data transfer from a failing drive is a hallmark of the Windows Home Server platform, and it will be missed. While this guide did not go into hardcore data recovery, I have found that by removing a failing drive early greatly increases the chances that one can recover most of not all data off of the drive.

Hopefully none of my readers will have to experience this, but if they do, I do hope this makes the process a bit easier. The 1. My advice with that drive is to RMA it before your warranty is up if it is not already. Too bad about the RMA.

Seagate is fairly to RMA things to so long as your serial number is under warranty. Thanks for this great little tutorial. One question comes to mind after reading, how do you determine if a drive is failing or beginning to have bad blocks? I assume you are reading info from the software with the areca controller? Unfortunatley, the onboard LSI controller on my setup does not pass smart data to homeserver, and the only drive I can see is the system drive, which is on a sata port, and off the controller.

When vail comes out, I plan on upgrading the controller at that time, and would like to make sure there is a way to monitor the drives through the Vail interface. Any thoughts on this? Jason — That is true however some people have shared folders that are not duplicated.

Also, upon failure, you are at risk of losing some of the data if another drive fails duplication of files, even within the same folder, can occur on different disks.

Click "OK" if a pop-up warning prompts you to change user accounts. Step 2: Click the "User Accounts" button at the top. Double-click administrator account in the list of users. This should be an account that you created with admin privileges or the main administrator account that was set up when you installed home server.

Step 4: Click "OK" to save the settings and store new password. This new password should be used to access administrator account in the future. But if there is really no any other available administrator including built-in administrator, the above will not effectively reset Windows Home Server admin password. Maybe you think of cracking password with free third-party password recovery software, but it is probably unsafe.

So these will often not be performed regulary. If your Windows Home Server still boots, you can check the event log of the server for error details. To do this, log in locally or via Remote Desktop client to the server desktop. Use the account name Administrator and the console password for login. Check the System and Application logs for errors red marked and warnings yellow marked.

If you find ntfs errors , double click them to see the details. In case of unreadable sectors get a replacement disk. After broken hardware is replaced, the next step would be to try a server reinstallation which may be named different, if you got your Windows Home Server as an OEM product.

This special installation mode will only wipe the system volume on C: and with it all user accounts, customizations, installed Add-Ins and applications, applied updates , but leave the data intact.

A new installation will wipe all drives, so be carefull, what you select. Be patient, since rebuilding the tombstones can take a long time without clear information on the screen, what is going on.

Before adding the clients again and redo the configuration tasks, run Windows Update through the console first. Repeat this after necessary reboots, until you don't get new updates offered any more. This is necessary to eliminate potential bugs. If you get no server reinstall offered , this can depend from the sequence, in which the disks are detected by the Bios or which drivers are provided initially.

The former or new system disk must always be detected as drive 0. In this case Windows Home Server setup can use built in drivers. Be aware that using SATA drivers may require, to present these drivers a second time during setup using a floppy disk. If a server reinstall fails , is not offered or is not possible due to severely broken hardware or the configuration cannot be reused due to a replacement of main hardware components, and you don't have a recent backup on another disk or location, you need to copy the data manually to a new location.