Thanks. One question about the recovery process that you outlined in your reply. Once the client finds the server, do I put the drive back into the machine and will the server recognize it that point?

Oh my I am bad.. You put the drive back in before you start the recovery process. Sorry for the confusion never ment for that to happen. So put the drive back in after 15 mins. Some will say 2 mins but I always like to make sure. If you smoke its 2 cigarettes.

_________________
Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8

Okay, it looks like the v3 OS was installed on the second drive (not the first drive that was removed to get the machine into recovery mode). Should I remove both drives and then only insert the main drive? And now, how can I remove the OS install from the second disk?

Hi afalciani,

This is a new one for me as I have not encoutered any instance where WHS was installed in Drive 1 rather then Drive 0 in an MSS. What I am curious about is if your data is intact and what if anything you may have lost. For this reason I advise caution because my concern is with your data.

Kindly let me know if you can access your data and if everything seems to be there then no harm was done but this will be a first for me. Were you running more then 2 drives in your server and if so how many? Also did you have file duplication turned on. You see drive 0 your original system drive most likely just have the WHS and some other misc files on it but drive 1 the drive you indicate had the OS installed on would of has quite abit of data stored on it. If you had 3 or 4 drives in yoru server and the files were set for duplication then the files on drive 1 would exist on drives 2 and 3 so your data would be safe.

If in your upgrade you selected Server Recovery then it would install WHS on its own partition and create another partition for data. What I am not sure of is if it overwrote the data that was on the drive or not meaning did it format the drive then crease the OS Partition and the data partition or did it shrnk the data partition and create the OS Partition for WHS. This is what I do not know because I have not experienced this or read about this situation happening.

So the real question is if your data is intact and if so and all looks good then your fine and if not then we have to figure out how to protect your data so you can perform the installation without losing anything so caution is advised at this point. My only regret is that I missed that one point and while I responded as soon as I saw your question it was not fast enough to guide you before you started the recovery process.

_________________
Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8

I lost all data... Fortunately, I had a backup (actually, I had two backups).

I have 2 physical disks. Yes, I had file duplication enabled. When the v3 recovered on to disk 2, it just put the OS files on the partition that was already there. No additional partiton was created. But, every time the server rebooted, it was booting to the original OS partition, the one with v1 on it. At this point though, the v1 configuration was somewhat broken. I receive errors about the backup service not starting, the second disk was showing up as inactive. Generally, strange behavior.

So, I plowed ahead. The only way I could make this work and continue with the v3 install was to remove disk 1 and disk 2, place disk 1 in the second position (first position empty to get the server into recovery mode), boot up and perform the recovery with v3. After completing the recovery, I continued with the reboot. With no disk in the first position, the server went into recovery mode. I shutdown, moved disk 1 to the first position and booted up. Now, the mistake I made was to put both disks back, because when the v3 install completed the second disk was clean (clearly reformatted at some point during the process). I am not sure, but maybe the duplicated files would have still been there if I left disk 2 out until the install process completed. It doesn't really matter, I had backups and I am on my way to getting the server back up and running.

The only thing I lost that I cannot re-create is the backup history (all of the backups of my machines over the past year or so). Looking back, I sort of wish I had purchased a new disk large enough to perform the backup copy from my MSS to my other WSS. Oh well, live and learn.