What do you do when a hard drive fails?
A Western Digital drive died in my system recently so I decided to document the steps I went through and what all happens during this process. I’m completely out of USB ports on my Media Smart Server so I decided to shut it off and re-organize. I’ve decided to use a USB hub for my printer and the battery backup and I’ll keep all data drives on their own dedicated port. When I powered it back up I noticed the top drive light was not on. Sure enough, I go back to my workstation and the notification icon is an angry RED color.
I tried re-seating the drive in question. It also felt cool to the touch when I thought it would be a tad warm even from casual use. My server is in a basement equipment room so it’s nice and cool so that my explain it.
I opened the console and here is what I found.
Here is what Disk Management Add-In reports. The non-storage drive is what I am using with KeepVault. KeepVault runs a nightly backup of my shares to this drive. It’s also the ioSafe drive.
Clicking the Network Critical notification also informs me that my backup database is feeling ill.
I’m also seeing these popups. The first one was for the music folder, now the Photos folder. I got a few more then finally a Network Critical notification. (Isn’t it fun to sneak a peek at what is running on other peoples toolbar? Think you can name all the apps in mine?)
My only option with the so-called “Missing Drive” is to remove it but I think I’ll poke around the Event Viewer via Remote Desktop to see if WHS is doing anything in the background. I also looked at Disk Manager and the drive is not there so I’m now convinced I have a bad drive. I guess my server has been trying to tell me that all along?
I’ll remove the offending drive.(you know I’m going to check it on another computer though!)
Several Hours!
Now is where I start thinking. What folders did I NOT have duplication turned on? DVD’s. Yep, my movie collection. Well, about 20 or so DVD rips. I was just about to start ripping some more DVD’s for a review too. I may have to start over if that folder was on the dead drive. I also think that the Software and Public folder were not duplicated. That might not be very smart on my part. My Software share was growing. I have started putting everything that I download there. Beta’s, drivers, Anti-Virus stuff. That’s going to suck if I have to re-download some of the beta stuff. Luckily, my Win7 ISO’s are still on my desktop!
Wait and see. 8:45PM start. 10:20 Finish
Once again lets triage the situation. What is bad, what is good?
Still seeing the database error.
Still seeing file conflict errors.
Under the shared folders tab I see some disturbing news.
This is the status of all my shared folders. The healthy folders are mostly unused or empty folders.
Fix it
It’s time to dive in and see what I can do to get rid of these errors. First thing is to pull the bad drive out and restart the server. This is recommended by Knowledge Base article link from this error message.
Further reading of this article suggests that by repairing the backup database I will lose all my PC backups. That is not good news but at least I have my shares intact.
After the reboot I see my shared folders are all healthy.
Before
After 
Disk Management is reporting more usage on two drives leading me to think that the duplication efforts were successful.
I still have the “backup database errors” critical notification so it looks like I’ll be clicking the repair button and losing my backups. Someone alert Yakuza that I’ll be downloading his BDBB Add-In real soon!
I let the process run all night so I don’t know how long it took. Here are the results.
Click next and the backup service will start again. It also re-checks database consistency. Even though it says its starting the backup service I have backups of all computers that were on last night. So I feel good about that. I never went very long without protection. The whole process lasted over 4 hours. It took longer because I took pause and read a whole bunch of stuff to make sure I didn’t goof anything up. In the end, I followed all the prompts and clues from WHS and it took care of everything.
Conclusion:
I suppose there is a lesson in this but there is also a question. Why can I not duplicate computer backups automatically from day one?
Did I lose anything important? I lost two backups that I wouldn’t mind having back. One was a family member laptop that I backed up just to have the image in case the family member had trouble in the future. I have the factory restore disks for this laptop so all is not lost here.
The other was an old laptop that needs a small repair. I had a new drive for it and never got around to the repair. I guess Win7 will go on it now.
On the bright side this issue did clear up a bunch of space for me! I can’t find much to complain about except for the fact that I cannot duplicate backups “out of the box.” I’m certainly aware of the Add-In BDBB but don’t normal users expect to be protected 100% when they purchase WHS? Even so, I only went 4 hours without backups. There was only a slim chance of failure during that 4 hour window. I can’t imagine the bad luck of having a computer hard drive fail during this vulnerable period. I bet it has happened to someone or it will.
I suppose I will take a deeper look at BDBB from Alex Kuretz and enable duplication of my backups via this Add-In.
Off to find a good hard drive deal!
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