Windows Home Server – Disaster Recovered
One of the (admittedly) cheap Samsung hard drives in my Home Server decided to start developing bad sectors and making noises like a coffee grinder.
Needless to say, this is not the kind of noise you want to start hearing from a hard drive, especially one in a server.
So, I had to start the process of replacing a hard drive, with real, valuable, data on the one that’s failing.
Due to my stuffing the server to the gills, I didn’t have every shared folder replicated; however non-shared folders contain non-critical data, so any loss will be annoying, but not fatal.
The first step was to remove the drive from the Home Server drive pool:
When it says it may take several hours, believe it. This screenshot was taken about two hours into the process of removing the 500Gb drive; it eventually took over ten hours to complete – probably because the disk was damaged. In the end I was one hard drive down, and the server was full.
The next issue was identifying which one of the four identical hard drives, was the one to be replaced. Fortunately an add-in helped here, specifically the Disk Management add-in. It lists the drives in order, so the /Device/HardDisk3 throwing the errors listed in the Event Log is the same as physical disk 3 as listed in the add-in, which in my case was on the SATA4 connection on the motherboard.
Once that drive was replaced, it was simply a case of rebooting and connecting to the WHS console to add the drive.
The new drive is listed as a Non Storage Hard Drive. I decided to get one of the lovely Western Digital Green Drives, a 750Gb unit, since I needed additional space (as you can see!) and they run cool and quietly.
Installing the drive was fast, and resulted in my server having some breathing room once more:
One final word of advice, once you do add a drive to a full Home Server, let the storage balancer run for a while, otherwise you won’t be able to copy any files of any size onto it – the first drive’s free space is used to gauge how big a file you can add to the server so the storage manager tries to keep that as free as possible. I don’t expect to be able to put any more large files onto the server until tomorrow, to give it chance to sort itself out.
But, I’ve not lost any files, which is not my normal experience of having a drive failure!
February 20th, 2008
