system drive fail- somebody remind me why WHS is so wonderful?

[btrcp2000]

Finally made it through a server reinstall, but it didn't do much good because the drives don't show up in the pool, they're just non-storage. The data is there, so I'll just have to manually move it. Maybe I could try again, but at this point I have once again lost a chunk of my life to computer battles

For me, WHS has been a huge failure so far. The primary intent is the ease of backup/restore of important files and client PC system disks. PC backups are unrecoverable without third party tools if the WHS system disk goes, so that's not that helpful out of the box. And while I didn't lose data, what I did get was nothing fancier than cutting and pasting about 1tb of data, which was only recoverable by physically removing the hard drive, cut/pasting to another pc, and then repasting back to the new whs system. That is a far, far cry from painless backup/restore.

I can't blame anyone but myself for this, as my number just came up and I trusted things too much. But anyone who thinks whs is bulletproof has not had the misfortune of losing a system drive combined with the inexplicable lack of ability to restore the drives to the pool. And all drives will die someday, so the lack of a system backup is a time bomb any way you want to look at it, especially for whs-version sage users.

Once my family can watch TV again, I will begin to seriously look at a separate WHS box, leaning toward the Acer H340. And then run it stock out of the box, except for BBDB. That setup I can have a little more faith in, and a warranty/free support period would be nice.

Originally Posted by gplasky

Well it is unfortunate but you had a drive die. There is no guarantee no matter what method you use you could ever recover your info from your system drive.

As to WHS and reinstallation, WHS will never just reformat your drives without telling you. You will always get a dialog about finding new drives and do you want to bring them into the pool. And it will warn you that it will reformat them. If unsure of the process then you can always keep the drives disconnected until after the new install of the drive, connect the drives later and boot to DVD to do a recovery.

[wayner]

Supposedly V2 of WHS is supposed to allow you to backup the system drive. But this is still likely a long way out as it hasn't even started its official beta yet although early builds are available on your favorite bittorrent sites.

I generally really like WHS but it has started to annoy me lately - there is this issue and Connector also refuses to work properly on one of my PCs - which was upgraded from Vista to W7. This is not a big deal since I prefer RDPing into the server rather than using the Console anyhow and I can just run the console via RDP from this PC.

[KarylFStein]

My SageTV server used to be Vista Business with three RAID-1 arrays (OS, TV, Media) on the built-in Intel matrix stuff. I used Acronis to image all desktops and the server, then GoodSync to dump images and media to an external drive. It was mostly solid after configuration of the desktops, (making sure they started backups at different times, and were awake--Acronis didn't wake them up from standby on its own). I've had server drives fail without an outage, and reinstalling an image took maybe 30 minutes, (even desktops over the network).

The only reason I switched to WHS was to tinker. The WHS approach seems easier on the configuration side and I like it. But, if I had an ordeal like this, I would probably scrap WHS and go back to the RAID setup. I chose RAID-1 because if I wanted to say increase my TV recording space, I just had to replace two drives. My biggest complaint is the Intel drivers don't have a way to email or otherwise alert you if there was a drive failure, (and I don't log on to the server much to see the icon). Also, the last driver version I used had some issue with dropping drives when the write-back caching was turned on, (no outages, but I had to rebuild the array).

I avoided RAID for a while because I thought it would be messy, but things are a lot different then when I used to run software RAID on Linux boxes. The Intel stuff just works except if you're going XP, you need the driver floppy for an install.

[sic0048]

Originally Posted by wayner

I generally really like WHS but it has started to annoy me lately - there is this issue and Connector also refuses to work properly on one of my PCs - which was upgraded from Vista to W7.

Are you sure you have installed the latest connector software on the Windows7 machine? M released another connector that works much better with Windows 7. If you simply upgraded the existing OS, or used the older connector installation disk, that might be your problem. I run a Windows7 machine (only 32bit however) without any problems. It is my main laptop, so I use the connector software quite a bit.

[davephan]

Originally Posted by KarylFStein

My SageTV server used to be Vista Business with three RAID-1 arrays (OS, TV, Media) on the built-in Intel matrix stuff. I used Acronis to image all desktops and the server, then GoodSync to dump images and media to an external drive. I've had server drives fail without an outage, and reinstalling an image took maybe 30 minutes, (even desktops over the network).

I also image the Windows XP Pro C drive with Acronis (Workstation 10 with Universal Restore), using the grandfather, father, and son method, daily. I also image with Ghost 9. The image files are stored on one of the RAID 1 volumes.

Since you brought it up, I will also copy the image files from the RAID 1 volume to a USB hard drive daily for extra redundancy. You mentioned "GoodSync", but I will use a free Microsoft program called "SyncToy", which will keep directories on different drives in sync.

I've recovered my Windows XP Pro system several times for different reasons, failures and just to try demo software. The recovery time is also about 30 minutes, most of which is totally unattended after starting the recovery process.

Dave

[btrcp2000]

Well, this nightmare is almost over with. I rebuilt using onboard raid1 for the OS (I know, it's not perfect, but I just want to buy some time to see what plays out with cablecards). I am now moving files back onto the shares. One major casualty appears to have been my entire music collection. It can of course be re-ripped/downloaded, but I took extra pains/time to move it off onto two separate drives. When I go to those drives, the directories are all there, but none of the files. "Show hidden" is already activated. Any ideas?

After this ordeal, I am pretty convinced that I am no better protected with WHS than without. Server reinstall is NOT a given, no matter what they say, and then you;re stuck with having to move everything off the drives so you can put them in the pool, and move everything back. And that didn't even work in the case of the music collection.

[btrcp2000]

Found my music collection on another drive that I had forgotten about. No, not one from my WHS pool. Those are full of empty files that make it LOOK like I had data. The first thing I did when I saw the extremely understated WHS alert that the OS drive was failing was have another win7 machine make a backup of everything I cared about, then promptly forgot about it as sage/whs limped along for another week or so.

So I'm pretty much back to functional, but still very wary of WHS. I just don't get how those directories wound up empty. The win7 backup I made also showed empty directories if I had it restore folders, but worked just fine when I had it look at files.

Anyway, I am now on a RAID1 for WHS OS drive, and still just manually backing up stuff to an external for now. Thanks to those who provided insight and suggestions.

[Skirge01]

Originally Posted by btrcp2000

One major casualty appears to have been my entire music collection. It can of course be re-ripped/downloaded, but I took extra pains/time to move it off onto two separate drives. When I go to those drives, the directories are all there, but none of the files. "Show hidden" is already activated. Any ideas?

If you copied the music onto two separate drives, how could you have lost it? The only thing that comes to mind is that WHS was somehow allowed to reformat them both.

[btrcp2000]

Originally Posted by Skirge01

If you copied the music onto two separate drives, how could you have lost it? The only thing that comes to mind is that WHS was somehow allowed to reformat them both.

Agreed, I don't get it either. If it reformatted, the directories wouldn't even be there, right? As it is, I have something like DE/shares/music/Led Zeppelin, but nothing in there. Maybe they are empty because file dupe didn't work like it was supposed to before everything went to hell?

The only thing I can think is maybe there is some other way I was supposed to be looking for these files. That thought is based on what I saw when restoring from the win7 backup, which is on a totally separate drive in another machine. If I restored "folders", it would show me a bunch of empty directories. If I restored "files" it brought back everything.

[SWKerr]

Originally Posted by btrcp2000

Agreed, I don't get it either. If it reformatted, the directories wouldn't even be there, right? As it is, I have something like DE/shares/music/Led Zeppelin, but nothing in there. Maybe they are empty because file dupe didn't work like it was supposed to before everything went to hell?

The only thing I can think is maybe there is some other way I was supposed to be looking for these files. That thought is based on what I saw when restoring from the win7 backup, which is on a totally separate drive in another machine. If I restored "folders", it would show me a bunch of empty directories. If I restored "files" it brought back everything.

I lost data in a RAID5 one time in a system with a hot spare. It actually hosed me during the rebuild of the new drive. I lost everything with a file name starting below "s". Some times there is no logical reason it is just a computer #&%#ing with you. I find if I don't talk bad about them they behave better.

[KarylFStein]

Originally Posted by Skirge01

I hope you don't mind a little critique of this. The first thing that this says to me is that you don't actually have a good backup plan. The fact that you haven't tested a restore says that you don't really know if your current method is actually working or not. While it may very well recover without any issues, you simply don't know yet. This leads me to the second thing, which is the RAID1 under WHS. I've heard (no firsthand proof) that WHS may not recover to a RAID array because it may not load the RAID drivers at an early enough point in the reinstall process. I know it works on a regular PC backup from WHS, since I've done that myself numerous times to a RAID1, but the WHS system drive is a different animal. Just something you may want to keep in mind.

FYI, I tested two restore scenarios over the past few days. First was a complete wipe with the only thing available for the restore being my off-site drive. Second was losing the WHS system disk by deleting then recreating the RAID-1 I have it on, (thus wiping it clean). In both cases, the restores worked fine although they took *forever*! Granted, I wasn't sitting in front of the computer the whole time and was documenting the steps, but compared to when I used Acronis, it was a major pain.

For the system disk loss, there were no driver issues during the reinstall as it let me load external drivers from floppy when needed just like when doing a clean install. Also, I didn't lose anything on the pool. I read some threads on a MS site that said you might have to do an install with the pool drives removed and then a reinstall with them in, but I just did a single reinstall with all pool drives plugged in and it worked.

I think I'll keep WHS, but it was good to go through and document--hopefully I'll never have to use those documents again . The kids will be happy to have TV back tomorrow...

[davephan]

Originally Posted by SWKerr

I lost data in a RAID5 one time in a system with a hot spare. It actually hosed me during the rebuild of the new drive. I lost everything with a file name starting below "s". Some times there is no logical reason it is just a computer #&%#ing with you. I find if I don't talk bad about them they behave better.

RAID 5 is risky unless you have the files backed up elsewhere, such as other drives or tapes. RAID 1 drive pairs is less risky since all your storage is not in one volume. Even though I use RAID 1 drive pairs, I also have my music, photos, and more important videos and files backed up on other drives, just in case. Years ago I used to use tape, but it is cheaper these days to use more drives.

Dave

[wayner]

Originally Posted by KarylFStein

For the system disk loss, there were no driver issues during the reinstall as it let me load external drivers from floppy when needed just like when doing a clean install. Also, I didn't lose anything on the pool. I read some threads on a MS site that said you might have to do an install with the pool drives removed and then a reinstall with them in, but I just did a single reinstall with all pool drives plugged in and it worked.

Doesn't WHS want to format all drives connected to it when you do a reinstall? Or does it recognize that the non-system drives are data drives and it leaves them alone to rebuild the index?

[btrcp2000]

Originally Posted by KarylFStein

FYI, I tested two restore scenarios over the past few days. First was a complete wipe with the only thing available for the restore being my off-site drive.
.

I'm confused, what was restored from your offsite drive? I assume it wasn't a WHS image, because I thought that wasn't possible?

[btrcp2000]

Originally Posted by wayner

Doesn't WHS want to format all drives connected to it when you do a reinstall? Or does it recognize that the non-system drives are data drives and it leaves them alone to rebuild the index?

That's what is supposed to happen, but it didn't in my case. I found it less time-consuming and less stressful to let it go the way it wanted after several attempts, and while WHS was fresh installing itself I was manually moving about 1tb of data to another drive, then copied it back to the shares once WHS was ready. Major PITA, but I didn't lose anything. I now have whs on RAID1, so I should be okay in case of one physical drive failure. Still not clear on what can be done to "rewind" whs back to an earlier state if something goes wrong unrelated to physical failure.

[Skirge01]

There's no restore point functionality in WHS currently. WHS2 is going to have the ability to back up the OS drive, but precisely what that's going to cover and entail is unknown at this point. Currently, "rewinding" to an earlier state means reinstalling the OS as new and letting WHS rediscover your pool, which means having to recreate users, reinstall/configure add-ins, SageTV, etc.

@KarylFStein: Glad you tested this and found out that it works. I did some further reading after I wrote my original reply and discovered that there were TWO points during the install where you needed to install drivers. First, during the WHS recovery (WHS GUI), where you can use a USB drive to load drivers and the second, when you're back in the text/DOS-based install with the all-too-familiar "Press F6 to install drivers" message. The word on the street is that if you do both of these, you can reinstall to just about any configuration. Is this what you had to do?

[KarylFStein]

Originally Posted by wayner

Doesn't WHS want to format all drives connected to it when you do a reinstall? Or does it recognize that the non-system drives are data drives and it leaves them alone to rebuild the index?

When I did a reinstall, it automatically added the pooled and non-pooled drives back without touching any of the data or duplication settings on them without me having to say anything about them.

Some people on a MS forum I read had the "Reinstall" option greyed out. In those cases, they had to remove all but the system drive, do a base install, shut down and add all the drives back, then boot from the install media to get the "Reinstall" option. I didn't have that issue and my system drive was totally empty.

The long part was adding drivers, user accounts/permissions, reinstalling the connector software on the desktops, and of course adding/configuring all the add-ins I use. This was made less painful because I sync files from the system drive to the pool. So for example, after I installed the SageTV add-in, I just grabbed the wiz.bin and other data files like remote settings from the pool and copied them over. For hMailServer, I store the data in the pool anyway and settings in MySQL, so just had to pull the ini file over and it was fine.

It doesn't compare at all to an image, but it could have been a MUCH longer and destructive process if I didn't have a backup of the data files in the pool...

[KarylFStein]

Originally Posted by btrcp2000

I'm confused, what was restored from your offsite drive? I assume it wasn't a WHS image, because I thought that wasn't possible?

No, I use GoodSync (there are free alternatives out there) to sync all data in the pool to a removable drive. Every week, I swap that drive with another I keep off-site. For this test, I had to do a clean OS install, set up the pooled drives, then connect the removable drive and copy all the data back to the pool. Even though the removable drive attaches via SATA, I ended up having to let the copy run overnight...not sure how long it took, but for sure more than a couple hours.

[KarylFStein]

Originally Posted by Skirge01

@KarylFStein: Glad you tested this and found out that it works. I did some further reading after I wrote my original reply and discovered that there were TWO points during the install where you needed to install drivers. First, during the WHS recovery (WHS GUI), where you can use a USB drive to load drivers and the second, when you're back in the text/DOS-based install with the all-too-familiar "Press F6 to install drivers" message. The word on the street is that if you do both of these, you can reinstall to just about any configuration. Is this what you had to do?

Yes, I had to load drivers from floppy twice during the install. After the inital GUI-based install, the computer reboots and goes into the "DOS"-type install like you said. If you're not there to press F6 at the right time, you'll see a BSOD. Don't worry--just reboot making sure it loads from the HDD and it'll take you back to the DOS install. Press F6 this time when it has the message on the bottom of the screen to do so (move fast!), load the ICHxR driver from the floppy, and all proceeds fine from there. I used a floppy for both driver loads and didn't try USB...

The only driver I had to pre-load was for the ICH8R (iaStor) for my RAID-1 system volume. I kept all hardware attached to the system during the install tests.

After the system was installed, I installed the Intel INF and Ethernet drivers. Then did the activation and a system update four or five times to get all the updates since SP1. Finally, I installed all the rest of the drivers: Hauppauge, USB-UIRT, video (not necessary), audio (not necessary), SiI 3132 drivers for the SATA card attached to my removable drive, and HECI (not necessary and requires you to tweak the INF file manually). I also installed the Intel Matrix client stuff, (which they call something else now). I went overkill on the drivers, but now I don't have any warnings when I look at my Device tab...simple pleasures .

[stevech]

Originally Posted by Skirge01

There's no restore point functionality in WHS currently. WHS2 is going to have the ability to back up the OS drive, but precisely what that's going to cover and entail is unknown at this point.

Wouldn't there be many, many non-expert Home Media Center people getting screwed to the max by WHS? No clue as to how to save the family photo/video collection? What was Microsoft Thinking?