But… if you do have to go through the process I used, I recommend RichCopy. It took some getting used to – but I trust it 100% now. I was afraid it would miss stuff, but 4TB later, it got everything.

In the end – you should be able to tell RichCopy to look at one drive, compare it to the other drive, and sync data to the drive without managing all of the duplicates.

I installed it on the WHS itself – the ONLY way I would do it.

Have at it! Cheers!

I moved my (3) data drives from a failed EX475 to a new EX485, and performed a server recovery.

You need to also move the System Drive from the old server to the new. If you do not do this, you could lose your Backup DB.

Also, the new system disk in the EX48x had a WHS OS on it, you need to delete all partitions on that disk so it is completely clean if you intend to use it in another WHS system.

I believe you should be able to simply move the old system drive to the new server, remove the new system drive, and perform the Server Recovery again (with all your original drives in the new server) and you should have your system intact.

Also, is there any hope for my computer backups from the old server?

Do NOT add those drives to the Storage Pool without getting the data off of them. If you add them, it will format the drive and you will lose all of the data.

From my earlier post – your only recourse to get the data off of them (at least that I have found…) is to Remote Desktop into the Server, find the drives (they should have a drive letter for each), and move the data to a drive already in the storage pool. Right now – likely the only drive in the pool is your primary drive (D:).

Each of the shares is still intact, but if you had data duplication turned on, you will have duplicates of the files to work through. This is where it gets somewhat cumbersome to move the data to the pool.

The location of the shares on each drive will be: ({Drive Letter}\DE\shares\{share name})

Here’s what you want to do:
1. Go into each share
2. Move the data from the non-pool drive to the pool
3. Once all of the data has been moved from that drive to the pool, then add that drive back to the pool.
4. Each time you get done with a drive, you will then be adding space back to the pool – so hopefully you’re not at capacity with all of the drives right now.

The best way to manage this ‘movement’ of data that I found was to use the tools I mentioned. See my January 12, 2010 at 3:48 pm post for those tools.

Best of luck – it’s not fun.

All of the drives I had connected were always data drives, none of them were Backup Drives. Once I booted the WHS after the restore, the WHS Console didn’t show them as missing, but instead showed them as “Non Storage Hard Drives” that I would have to add to the pool. The only “Storage Hard Drive” listed after recovery was the new 1.5TB in the 1st drive bay.

To your question on the Recovery process, as everyone else notes – you have to remember to directly connect your WHS to the Ethernet port of the PC where you’re performing the recovery. One note not in the instructions for the WHS Recovery – “when is it OK to remove the LAN cable and reconnect both the PC and WHS back to the switch?” Other than that – very straightforward process.

Thanks for keeping us all informed!

Secondary question, did you have any issues with the Server Recovery process on your EX495?

Spoiler – it did not work as I’d hoped. (will detail after the overview)

I wanted to upgrade from my EX470 to a new EX495. I had a total of 6 drives (4 Internal & 2 USB) for my EX470 system. I received the EX495 with the internal 1.5TB drive and followed the steps above.

First process I tried, move ALL of the drives from the EX470 into the EX495 and perform the Server Recovery from DVD, hoping the Recovery process would only replace the OS on the 500GB original C: volume (on Drive 0).

Drive 0 (System Vol & Data) – Original 500GB
Drive 1 Data
Drive 2 Data
Drive 3 Data
Drive 4 Data
Drive 5 Data

I went through the whole recovery process and when it was finished, it booted and I was able to login, only problem – none of the data drives were in the pool, they were only seen from WHS as an individual drives (Drives J, K, L, M, N). The WHS shares didn’t populate with my data.

Thinking that this was a problem with the original 500GB drive from my EX470, I thought – let’s pop in the 1.5TB that came with the EX495 that has the new Sys Vol partition on it.

This time, the drive arrangement looked like this:
Drive 0 (System Vol & Data) – New 1.5TB from EX495
Drive 1 Data
Drive 2 Data
Drive 3 Data
Drive 4 Data
Drive 5 Data

Went through the Server Recovery process again with this arrangement, loaded it up, same result. All data drives were ‘Out’ of the pool and none of my data was recognized in the New shares.

I gave up after trying this restore several times with the same result, so I just decided to move all of my data from drives J/K/L/M/N to the new shares. Since most of my data was duplicated on those drives – the trick now was to not overwrite or remove data, but parse through all of it and get everything back to their appropriate shares.

If you need to do this – I recommend two different tools that made this process ‘nearly’ painless (just time consuming…)

Go out and get FolderMatch (Shareware) and RichCopy (free from MS) and use those tools to do a comparison of the New Share (D:\shares\{Share name}) and Old Share ({Drive Letter}\DE\shares\{share name}) and ‘Sync’ only the missing data from each drive.

This sounds confusing as I write it – and I’d be happy to tell more, but just wanted to share the experience I had. I was hoping for easier results, but in the end – remember, all of the data is still there and recoverable.