Rebuilding my WHS...ain't working

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Kil4Thril

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Sep 21, 2003
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:mad:

My boot/sys drive croaked. I took a new drive, installed WHS, replaced my data drives, then did a server reinstall. It doesn't see my shares. I can get to them through explorer, but not through the WHS functions. Every drive has been checked while docked to my main machine and check out fine. Where do I go from here?
 
I believe you were supposed to connect the data drives before doing a reinstall.

Summary of instructions:

1.Primay disk fails (or you want to replace it with a bigger one)
2.Shut the system down, yankout the drive and put the new drive in
3.Boot the system from the Windows Home Server setup DVD
4.When it asks what kind of installation you want choose "Server Reinstallation"
5.We will re-create the 20GB system partition as well as the primary data partition
6.Drive extender will do what we call a "RebuildPrimary"
7.When done you will have to re-create user accounts in the console, re-setup Remote Access, re-install and setup add-ins, and reconfigure any other setting change you may have done.
Click to expand...

Zero the drive and try again?
 
Yeah, way I understand it all drives should be connected and the Server Reinstallation is key. I think there is an explanation there telling what it is for too.

Something just occurred to me, what about the user shares? Are they lost because you had to rebuild the drive and recreate user accounts? Hope you don't have trouble getting that stuff back.
 
I should have stated. I did a "fresh install" on the new drive. Then connected the shares, and then Reinstall becomes an option. At that point, according to everything I've scrounged up, it should rebuild the shares. It didn't. I'll try it again this afternoon.
 
I should have stated. I did a "fresh install" on the new drive. Then connected the shares, and then Reinstall becomes an option
Click to expand...

That what I thought you said but the instructions say different.

The idea is that the install will look around at the disks connected to it and recognize the data drives as belonging to a WHS machine.

It will then offer to reinstall the OS.

I've had a much less than steller experience with WHS during the past 1.5 yrs and have had to do 3 or 4 TOTAL reinstalls of the OS and data and probably the same amount of OS repair installs.

Sometimes WHS will give a reinstall option and sometimes it won't. I will say this, if it gives you a reinstall option take it the first time or you may not see it again.

Which ever way you decide to go, Good Luck!
 
That was the problem. I didn't get the reinstall option the first time. Only after I installed fresh on the new drive would it give me the option. Is there anything out there that will force a "tombstone scan"?
 
Is there anything out there that will force a "tombstone scan"?
Click to expand...

Never heard of one. If ya find one please share! :)

The reinstall option should have done all that, but as you can see...........

If I were you, I'd zero that drive and try again.

I dunno how much data you have but my measly 2TB takes @ 6-8 hours.
 
I just wanted to add.........

I was in your position once.

I installed to a bare drive and then hooked-up the old data drives but doing a repair/reinstall doesn't pick-up the data drives because they weren't there when the OS was installed.....sound familiar?

What I did was to go into the OS drive, while all the data drives were connected, and delete a few OS files.

Naturally the thing wouldn't boot but wadda know.....NOW the WHS install disk offered to reinstall that forked-up OS and it picked-up all the data disks as well.

BINGO!
 
Kil4Thril said:
It did work. Now, I need to do it all again. Lol
Click to expand...

Thanks for the positive update. This thread parallels my experience with trying to recover from a system disk failure.
I followed "Old Hippie" and deleted some files in C:\Programs\Windows Home Server but it didn't get to the point of boot failure.
Even without a boot failure the X:Files program now offered a "Server Reinstallation" option and that appeared to go well.

BUT the server pool was not rebuilt and the old pool drives (5) all appeared as "not added" disks.
[I would like to avoid the manual transfer of the data from these old pool drives so I will keep searching for a work around.]

All the best with your "I need to do it all again".
 
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