Coping With A WHS Hard Disk Failure
Everton | Mar 22, 2008 | View Comments
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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Sorry to hear about your hard disk failure Everton – no wonder you’ve been busy and not posting much this week! Just typical that the drive to fail would have the stuff you’re really bothered about – sod’s law or what eh?
Good luck with it, I’ve never used Linux myself neither, so if you try that route, I’d appreciate a post detailing how you get on with it.
Google ‘ddrescue’ and you’ll probably find a few guides out there about recovering files off dead harddrives from linux. One thing you should DEFINITELY do is make an image of your harddisk. That way if it becomes completely unusable you’ll have an diskimage of your harddrives contents safe on a usable drive.
If you need any help just let me know. The best thing you could do is read as much as possible before messing too much with it as the more you access that drive the less it’s probably going to work
@tash
thanks for the image tip – that’s a very good idea. Will try it tomorrow
Before removing the drive from WHS did you try reight-clicking on the drive in question within the Server Storage tab within the console and clicking “Repair”?
@Philip
Yes, and I also tried running chkdsk which didn’t help. There’s not a lot software can do if the hardware has failed physically which I think is what has happened
It may be hardware, but there is a known problem with Windows Home Server. Have a read here before you start believing your hardware has failed:
http://blogs.technet.com/homeserver/archive/2008/03/10/an-update-on-kb-946676.aspx
@xslogic
It’s a hardware failure as the machine won’t even boot if the drive is connected
That kind of nails it, then…
Sorry for your loss.
My drive has also failed, well its been dying for months now..
As a suggestion why don’t you invest on a Drobo? It will always create a backup of your drives in it and when one fails all the content of the dead drive will be scattered into the other drives and once you replace it it will retore the files back to that drive..
@vance
My WHS normally has redundancy, but I messed it up by deciding to rebuild at the wrong time :-(