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

[Skirge01]

Originally Posted by stevech

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?

Not at all. WHS is designed for the non-expert. Thus, MS designed it so that you aren't supposed to do anything to the OS, other than install it. Everything else is done elsewhere via the drive pool, such as your photos, music, etc. If you lose the OS drive, you do a reinstall and it finds your existing data and it will all show up again, just as it had been. The only rework you need to do is recreate users and reconnect the client PCs.

Where people like us get all screwed up is that we use it for SageTV, SJQ, comskip, webservers, email servers, FTP, utorrent, etc. For us, we'll also need to reinstall all of that, which is why we need to have backups on the drive pool of our configuration for each of those. This is what WHS2 is supposed to be taking into consideration in some form.

[crobs808]

My WHS server is automatically ghosted once a week. WHS is not impossible to backup, but rather easy actually. I prefer ghosting rather than 'backing up' user files, since all I have to do is put in a new harddrive, and re-ghost from the last image, and voila! - no reinstalling needed and no reconfiguing settings or anything. It is like it never happened. Of course re-ghosting takes about 30 minutes, but I can handle 30 minutes every 5 years or so when a harddrive crashes - big deal.

[Skirge01]

I'd love to see your tutorial on how to backup and restore a WHS OS drive without losing any data in the drive pool.

[stevech]

Originally Posted by crobs808

My WHS server is automatically ghosted once a week. WHS is not impossible to backup, but rather easy actually. I prefer ghosting rather than 'backing up' user files, since all I have to do is put in a new harddrive, and re-ghost from the last image, and voila! - no reinstalling needed and no reconfiguing settings or anything. It is like it never happened. Of course re-ghosting takes about 30 minutes, but I can handle 30 minutes every 5 years or so when a harddrive crashes - big deal.

Ghosting, equivalent to Acronis drive Imaging? Or partition imaging? I prefer drive imaging because this gets all partitions and the boot blocks.

[sic0048]

Originally Posted by crobs808

My WHS server is automatically ghosted once a week. WHS is not impossible to backup, but rather easy actually. I prefer ghosting rather than 'backing up' user files, since all I have to do is put in a new harddrive, and re-ghost from the last image, and voila! - no reinstalling needed and no reconfiguing settings or anything. It is like it never happened. Of course re-ghosting takes about 30 minutes, but I can handle 30 minutes every 5 years or so when a harddrive crashes - big deal.

Originally Posted by Skirge01

I'd love to see your tutorial on how to backup and restore a WHS OS drive without losing any data in the drive pool.

I'd love to see it too. I do have to ask one question however (and please don't take it the wrong way).... have you ever tested it or recovered a WHS OS disk from your ghost images?

Everything I've read has lead me to believe this method will not work. The problem comes with the tombstones that WHS uses to recover data. Those tombstones are changing constantly. If your image has tombstones that are old (which they would be within a hour or so of the image being created), it is extremely likely that your data on the drive pools would not be able to be recovered because they system wouldn't "know" where the data is (it gets that information from the tombstones).

If you have tried it and have recovered an entire WHS system (OS drive and data drives), I'd love to see some more information regarding how you set it up.

Thanks!

[robogeek]

Originally Posted by crobs808

My WHS server is automatically ghosted once a week. WHS is not impossible to backup, but rather easy actually. I prefer ghosting rather than 'backing up' user files, since all I have to do is put in a new harddrive, and re-ghost from the last image, and voila! - no reinstalling needed and no reconfiguing settings or anything. It is like it never happened. Of course re-ghosting takes about 30 minutes, but I can handle 30 minutes every 5 years or so when a harddrive crashes - big deal.

While there is really nothing about WHS that will prevent you from creating an image of the system drive (the C: and D: partitions), you'll very likely run into major problems if you attempt restore a backup. The only time I think it would work is if you only have a single drive system...one large system drive and no other hard drives as part of the storate pool. The WHS storage pool uses the D: partition to store tombstones. The D: partition acts as a catalog and the tombstones are the index of pointers in that catalog that tell WHS which physical drive each file is actually located on. Everytime you add or remove a file from one of the storage pool shares, the tombstones on the D: drive are updated. Everytime a PC on the network is backed up, everytime the Demigrator kicks in to balance the drives or duplicate files, the tombstones on the D: partition are likely to change.

Let's say today file A is on physical drive 1 in the storage pool just before a backup is made, and then tomorrow the Demigrator moves file A to physical drive 2, and then the system drive fails. What would happen to your storage pool data when you restore the backup that says file A is on drive 1 when in fact it isn't, it's on drive 2?

The only way to really recover from a system drive failure is to replace the system drive and use the server recovery option during the OS reinstallation. This allows WHS to examine your previously used storage pool to rebuild the tombstones so all of the pointers are pointing to the right locations. The actual steps to accomplish this should be available on the Microsoft web site and it would be a good idea to find it, print it out, and put it in a disaster recovery binder along with your software registration/serial numbers, and a thumb drive that contains all of the driver updates, Power Pack updates, and 3rd party software and WHS Add-ons that you have installed on your WHS machine. To prevent the reconfiguration nightmare associated with a complex SageTV installation, backup the C:\Program Files\SageTV directory to the storage pool or another machine on your network on a nightly basis...then all you need to do after reinstalling WHS is to install SageTV and then copy the backup back to the C: drive and you're all set to go.

WHS v1 was not originally designed to be used to host 3rd party applications like a desktop machine or like Windows Server 2003/2008. It was designed primarily as a home storage server appliance. It's people like many of us here in the SageTV forums that do some more advanced things that the average home users don't do that is causing the problems. We run all of this "extra" software that causes us to have to go through a major hassle when the system drive fails...reinstalling the WHS OS, reinstalling all of this "extra" software, applying Power Packs and OS updates, and updating drivers for tuner hardware that normally wouldn't be found in a WHS machine.

Hopefully WHS v2 will address the needs of some of us more advanced users.

[gplasky]

An Image of a WHS OS drive could only work in one specific manner. That is if you were doing an OS drive upgrade where you imaged the original OS drive, immediately removed it and replaced it with a new drive and then restored the image to the new drive. If you were to image the drive let's say every day and added new files to the WHS server and have to restore the image BEFORE the next image the location of those files would be lost and WHS would know nothing about those files existing.

The other issue with imaging or cloning a WHS drive is this. WHS uses (GU)ID numbers stored in the partition table of each disk to help identify them. When using disk imaging software to migrate an operating system from one disk to another disk, these disk ID numbers are typically not cloned during the disk imaging operation. To Function properly, WHS requires that the disk ID number of the newly imaged disk match that of the image source.

A cloned WHS system disk with a mismatched disk ID number will still boot normally but will exhibit a number of Critical Health Warnings the most common of which is the “Backup Service is not Running” warning.

You can manipulate the disk ID using the uniqueid feature of the diskpart command to transfer the old Disk ID from the original disk and apply it to the new disk, allowing Windows Home Server to boot successfully with none of the warnings usually encountered. I won't go thru the process here but you need to know what you are doing to accomplish this.

The other thing people forget about WHS is this: It is an OEM product. As such the OEM is responsible for providing recovery methods for the original install. HP, Acer and other manufacturers provide a DVD Recovery and usually a method to boot the server headless and provide that recovery method from another PC.

I am working on an article to describe this and other workarounds to some of the deficiencies of WHS.

Gerry