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?
Bookmark & Share
Comment by ekolar on 11 April 2008:
Your best bet is TestDisk
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
Comment by Stanley on 29 March 2008:
Sorry for losing the photos & music files respectively.
Pingback by Blog statistics from Feb 25th 2008 till date - Mobile J Games on 25 March 2008:
[...] Connected Internet: Everton had ended up with some bad news after his Hard disk died with many of his photos collections and music files in there. And again his Main PC as well died [...]
Comment by Barry Cleave on 24 March 2008:
Everton
I remembered I saw this tip, not sure of if it will help and there are also some other suggestions in the comments.
http://digg.com/hardware/Putting_your_Dead_Hard_Drive_in_the_Freezer_may_Get_it_working_again
Barry Cleave
http://proreviewer.com
PS Your “Split” comments isn’t working for me in Firefox or IEexplorer. Can only see the latest comments in Firefox and they don’t even show (can’t see the text but can see the avatars) in IEex. Clicking on the page number or All just sends me back to your homepage.
PPS Just gone back to the article from the homepage in IEex and all the comments are listed but can’t see the text, just a bullet point to the left and avatar to the right.
Comment by vance on 23 March 2008:
@everton Ah I see.. I guess I can only say sorry for your loss.
Comment by Everton on 23 March 2008:
@vance
My WHS normally has redundancy, but I messed it up by deciding to rebuild at the wrong time