Article on Windows Home Server grief

[vca]

Here's an interesting story about one Windows Home Server user's grief when a drive went bad:

 

http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2010/03/26/recovering-from-a-windows-home-server-crash/

 

it almost sounds like he made matters worse than they should have been, but given the guy is a software engineer at Intel he probably knows what he's doing (and this might have been fatal for a normal user).

 

Looks like the drive that died was the system boot drive and the restore/rebuild process that Microsoft supplies is not very good for this sort of event.  It seems to imply there is some critical information that is only present on that one drive.  The equivalent failure for an unRAID box would have been a flash key failure at which point one just formats up a new key (perhaps gets a new license issued) and then hits the "restore" button to get everything back with no further grief (or perhaps uses the "trust my parity procedure?").

 

Regards,

 

Stephen

[xamindar]

Yep, remember this is Windows. To be expected. That's why unraid doesn't run on windows.

[boof]

It sounds more like a problem with the hardware he was using than WHS.

 

Had he had a 'normal' server with a VGA port etc and a standard copy of WHS on CD / DVD he could have just booted it up and elected to 'server reinstall' (presuming he'd replaced his failed boot drive).

 

WHS will then reinstall and scan the other data disks for files and recreate the tombstones (the critical information only available on one drive - effectively a symlink to where the actual data is) in the correct places.

 

You would lose any add-ins, user accounts and files that were actually on the boot drive - but that's why it has the share duplication...

 

Sounds like he knew enough to be dangerous - I wouldn't have been putting the WHS boot drive in any other machine and trying to boot and then the issue of having to pxe boot his server off his own desktop machine using some random IBM tool because it had no direct access...

 

I've done a WHS restore as above in 'testing' and it worked ok - doing it against 20TB worth of data may be a completely different experience of course...

 

Your data is still there on the data disks (as the article explains) in a similar fashion to unraid so his chances of data loss (other than the system drive) weren't high.

[ilovejedd]

It sounds more like a problem with the hardware he was using than WHS.

 

Had he had a 'normal' server with a VGA port etc and a standard copy of WHS on CD / DVD he could have just booted it up and elected to 'server reinstall' (presuming he'd replaced his failed boot drive).

 

WHS will then reinstall and scan the other data disks for files and recreate the tombstones (the critical information only available on one drive - effectively a symlink to where the actual data is) in the correct places.

 

You would lose any add-ins, user accounts and files that were actually on the boot drive - but that's why it has the share duplication...

 

Sounds like he knew enough to be dangerous - I wouldn't have been putting the WHS boot drive in any other machine and trying to boot and then the issue of having to pxe boot his server off his own desktop machine using some random IBM tool because it had no direct access...

 

I've done a WHS restore as above in 'testing' and it worked ok - doing it against 20TB worth of data may be a completely different experience of course...

 

Your data is still there on the data disks (as the article explains) in a similar fashion to unraid so his chances of data loss (other than the system drive) weren't high.

 

This, I'd have to agree with. WHS uses JBOD same as unRAID, and drives are formatted as regular NTFS volumes.

 

If he built a server using off-shelf parts and no "factory reset" buttons, he'd probably have fared better.

[lionelhutz]

If you have a new installation, I'm quite sure WHS will not recognize a new drive is actually a pre-existing one and just add it with the data intact. unRAID can though by just booting the new flash and then assigning the pre-existing drives to disk slots. All the data will immediately come back again when the array is started.

 

So, does WHS have any warnings about it formatting a new drive when it is added so you can abort having it wipe out your data?

 

Peter

 

[boof]

If you have a new installation, I'm quite sure WHS will not recognize a new drive is actually a pre-existing one and just add it with the data intact. unRAID can though by just booting the new flash and then assigning the pre-existing drives to disk slots. All the data will immediately come back again when the array is started.

 

So, does WHS have any warnings about it formatting a new drive when it is added so you can abort having it wipe out your data?

 

Peter

 

 

A drive can't be both new and pre existing. And if you're formatting a new drive then it can't by definition have any of your data on it as it's a new drive.

 

WHS has two install modes, a standard installation will just format any drives attached to the system. A re install (used for recovery of broken systems) will not and will scan and parse data on the data drives found and rebuild the indexes and tombstones accordingly.

 

Both modes are documented.