Recovering from a Windows Home Server crash

By Ylian Saint-hilaire (Intel) (246 posts) on March 26, 2010 at 3:23 pm

Regulars of my blog know that I have been working on an add-in for Windows Home Server for managing computers. It's all tied in with the web site and the smart phone support from my previous blog. In any case, I am the happy owner of a Lenovo IdeaCentre D400 (picture below) and have been using it as a development platform. It came with a 1 terabyte disk and I since added 2 x 1.5T and 1 x 300G drives in it, along with a memory upgrade from 1 Gig to 2 Gig. All my files where duplicated on 2 drives for safely.

Well, 3 days ago, the main boot drive crashed. The box would not work anymore and would not boot. It would just get stuck early in the boot process. I opted to remove the drive (easy, it slides right out) and plug it into my desktop machine. Even as a secondary drive, the desktop would jam during boot. So, it's fairly certain this drive it not in good shape. At this point, a small feeling of panic started creeping in. I know all my files are located on the other drives, but how to I get the Windows Home Server up and running again?

Note that there is no VGA port in the back of this box, so you don't have much control over anything. For a little while, I considered changing the Micro-ITX board in the box for a "real" computer motherboard, but all the connectors on this motherboard are non-standard and it's really hard to find a Micro-ITX motherboard that is cheap and has 4 SATA ports (most have 2).

After looking at the CDROM's that came with the unit and going online, there is a recovery procedure. I replaced the failed 1T drive with a 1.5T and hit a small reset button in the back, this seems to cause the BIOS to start the network adapter (my network switch light up) and you start a recovery disk on the desktop which launches the re-imaging of the device. When you re-image, you can do recover or factory reset. I am not sure why, but the recover option did not work. Maybe because I changed the boot drive? That's not good. I disconnected all the drives with data on them and started a factory reset. After a while, my Windows Home Server was back up and running... with no data. I then connected back the data drives one by one, did a remote desktop (RDP) to the WHS device and copied the data files back into the "D" drive, which is the shadow drive that distributes the data. Each time a copy was done, I would add the data drive to the WHS shadow system and start to copy another data drive into the "D" drive.

To do all of the copying and skip duplicate files, I used "Teracopy", it's a free fast copy software. Even with Tetacopy, the process took two full days. As I am writing this,  my device is almost back to it's original state. I just reactivated the "duplicate folder" feature so WHS is now duplicating all the files. I do wonder if there is an easier way to recover from a failed WHS boot drive? Maybe I should have done a factory reset with only the boot drive, put the data drives back and did a "recovery reset" and see if it would see the 3 new data drives? Or maybe a factory reset would have detected my data disks and not formatted them? Not a risk I was willing to take.

If anybody has the real way to recover from a crashed boot drive in WHS, please comment.

Ylian
opentools.homeip.net

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Comments (10)

March 27, 2010 2:07 PM PDT


Olaf Engelke		 Hi,
I made a FAQ a while ago: "How to recover data after server failure" in http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/whsfaq/thread/cf354.....573697777f
Your method to copy data to D: can cause later culprits (dependent from how you did do this).
Server recovery usually should have worked, but if the crash also affected WHS related structural infomations on the DATA disks, the setup routine may not have detected the former installation any more.
And no, if you keep the data disk attached during the fresh installation, your drives will be formatted. If you attach them later, and try a recovery then, this should not happen, but the new installation does not know about the old data, therefore they will not be recovered. And I also would not bet my data on that :-)

Best greetings from Germany
Olaf
March 28, 2010 4:36 PM PDT


Bill		 This should give you some direction. You may want to cross post here and ask others for help. Good luck.

http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/whssoftware/thread/.....3cb834eb33
March 28, 2010 7:37 PM PDT


mary branscombe		 http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/whsfaq/thread/cf354..... 573697777f has a good step by step guide

this has less information on the steps and more background
http://social.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/whsfaq/thread/cdb38.....351dc1c0bf
March 29, 2010 6:28 AM PDT


imad		 I suggest that you re-read what you write before posting. Just for the sake of typos and errors that you have in this aricle.

i think that blogs and emails and the internet should not be free. Maybe that will make people re-think before sending/writing stuff.


March 29, 2010 6:46 AM PDT


Andy Pagin		 Personally I would boot the machine from a Linux live cd, something like Linux Knoppix, mount the damaged file system & do whatever repairs are needed with the appropriate Linux utilities.
March 29, 2010 8:53 AM PDT


Noah Erickson		 I haven't had to do this, but isn't that the point of doing manual backups of the server itself? I have a 1TB external HDD that I back the server up to weekly. Somewhere I got the impression that you can add the external as a "Server Backup Hard Drive" in Server Storage in the console, then go back over to Computers & Backup and do a restore of the server. At least I hope that's the case, or I'm backing up the server for nothing!
March 29, 2010 9:40 AM PDT


Jim Wilson		 I think I would have checked to see if the boot drive could be seen by another Windows PC, then run chkdsk on all partitions thereof. I'm not saying it would have cured the issue, but I've seen this fix problems many times (provided that is a true NTFS drive and not some kind of VM conglomeration).

As for the proper procedure, the Lenovo support site is very, very, very slow (as if running on a leftover IBM PC from the 1980's) and fairly useless. I saw no knowledgebase, no forum or faqs. I guess I can see why you're asking here instead of their site. Obviously, reading the manual didn't help.

I would not recommend using any storage device without at least RAID 1 or 5. Time will always kill your HD, sooner or later.
March 29, 2010 4:50 PM PDT


Gordon Watts		 Ugh. I went through this exact proceedure myself a few months ago. Mine was a home-built system. Exactly as you said, the server failed to recognize those other DATA drives as being part of the server, and the result was I had to do exactly what you did. Though I didn't have terracopy... I'll look into that next time (hopefully there will be no next time!!).

A possible feature request: when you connect a drive that looks like a WHS, automatically incorporate it into the server (including creating new shared directories, etc.). That shouldn't be too hard to do. And it would make this sort of recovery almost trivial. :-) Of course, this use case is pretty small, i would hope!
March 30, 2010 1:52 AM PDT

Ylian Saint-hilaire (Intel)
Ylian Saint-hilaire (Intel)Total Points:
20,222
Black Belt
 Looking at this link:

http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/whsfaq/thread/cf354.....573697777f

It seems like I did exactly the right thing. Since the WHS recovery option failed, the only way to go was reset the WHS completely using a new main boot disk and to copy all the files back into the WHS one-by-one. It was a really long process, but it worked.
June 29, 2010 3:25 PM PDT


J. W. Bell		 After the things that you went through and what you learned in the process would you still get the D400 again?
I am in the market for a NAS device for home use mostly data retention and media, but am finding little on this particular device.

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