Coping With A WHS Hard Disk Failure

I haven’t written a lot of posts this week as I’ve spent most of the week trying to recover files from one of the hard drives in my Windows Home Server that has stopped working.  I have several disks in my WHS machine, and if any of the other drives had failed I wouldn’t have cared so much, but this drive just happened to be the one with all my photos (and some music) on it which obviously can’t be replaced and are priceless to me.

The WHS box has been telling me intermittently that the drive has been failing for a few weeks now, but the messages always went away, so I just ignored them.  When my WHS box started transferring files really slowly rather than attributing this to the earlier warnings, I decided it was a software rather than a hardware problem and rebuilt the whole machine. This involved moving all my files temporarily from the WHS machine to my other PCs, before moving them back.  If only I’d removed the faulty drive before moving my files back, as it died before the Folder Duplication had finished…… :-( My JungleDisk service wasn’t of much use, as it had so far only backed up around 50% of my music and none of my photos because of my slow upload speed.

Anyway, I’ve managed to recover manually about 50% of my photos and around 95% of my music by connecting the drive to my main PC and accessing the hidden shared folders (DE/Shares) on the drive that WHS uses.  However, my machine won’t boot anymore with the disk attached, so I can’t use this method to recover the remaining files.

I took the drive down to Tottenham Court Road yesterday to see if I could pay someone to recover the remaining files.  I really wasn’t impressed with the responses I was getting, particularly as I felt I was going to pay someone with no more technical knowledge than me to perform the same methods I’d already tried.

One very friendly tech at YoYOtech, which is where I go for sensible advice on systems, suggested I boot my machine with a Linux CD which would allow me to continue searching the failed Hard Drive for files.  It’s going to be an interesting experience for me as you may find this amazing to learn, but I’ve never used linux before!  I’ll let you know how I get on.

Anyone got any suggestions as to which version I should try first?

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