My EX475 system drive failed. Server was down. Bought/installed new drive and attempted to run recovery. Sever could not be found on network. All attempts to run recovery failed. Restarted router and switch in order. Checked port forwarding values. The appropriate switch port and WHS NIC both showed connectivity. I found that if I removed the three storage drives, the WHS was discovered immediately and was readily recovered using recovery disc. Now I have the server operating and updated but have three uninstalled storage pool discs loaded with data and I don't know what to safely do to get the files back into the server. I read on some forum entry to simply install each disk in a USB dock, read it with a PC(Win10) and copy the files back to the server. When I do this I will see that for instance 325Gb is free out of 931Gb on the HD. When I open the drive it tells me the volume is empty. What am I missing? Any help will be of welcome and greatly appreciated by myself and my family.

It sounds like possibly one of the pool drives is at least partially hosed also causing your recovery to fail.

But anyway when you view the disk while connected to the pc you will need to turn on view hidden files and folders in the view options for windows explorer.

Then the data will be in a sub folder.

If it were me I would purchase at least one more drive for the pool. So you have a place to copy to in the server to start with.
Unless you have a place already to temporarily store the data from at least one drive.
But if you find one drive is bad then you will be short a drive.

Connect one of the old drives to the PC,turn on the view hidden files option.
Then copy what you can from one old disk. format it run chkdsk to see if it is corrupted and if it passes add that drive back to the pool. rinse and repeat for each additional drive.

Also some of you data may be on the old system drive in the D: partition.
Windows os C: is only 20gb. the rest of the drive is D: for data.

Plus I hope you install the whs addin SMART to monitor your drives in the future.

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