Help - WHS seems hosed!

[wayner]

I noticed a day or two ago that I couldn't log in to my WHS home page. After checking things out on my WHS server it said that there were problems with my system drive. I ran a repair on this drive and it did its thing and then rebooted and ran chkdsk. According to WHS there currently aren't problems with my drive but IIS will not start on the server and when I look at Event Viewer there are mentions of missing or corrupt files. It also seems that I cannot start the console from remote PCs but I can run it from the server either at a terminal or via RDP. The shared folders are fine and WHS says the drive is Healthy. Sage seems to be working OK but I am worried that there may be other issues with my WHS.

So it looks like I may have to do a reinstall of WHS. I do have backups of my Sage folder but I don't look forward to having to install drivers for tuners (HD-PVRs, firewire, etc.) - not to mention doing a server reinstall as I have 5.2TB of storage on the system.

A couple of question:
My Recorded TV is not duplicated and to do so would take many TBs. Is there any way of moving any non-duplicated files off of the data volume on the system drive. Normally you can remove drives in WHS but I don't imagine that you can remove the system drive, can you?

IF/when I do the WHS reinstall how should I do it? Should I install WHS - do my config like users, remote access, etc? Should I update the OS before installing drivers, Sage, etc. - my version is pre PP1 so it has to do all of the updates for the last couple of years which may take a while as it rebuilds the indexes of files on the data volume?

What is the best way of reinstalling Sage without causing too many hassles? I have a backup of my Sage folder - should I reinstall Sage and then copy over all files from my backed up Sage folder? Would this reinstall all add-ins like SageMC, SJQ, SRE, Sage Web Server, Jetty, etc, etc? Or do I have to reinstall everything including addins from scratch and then use the advanced file recovery option. I imagine I should be ok with addins as they don't touch the registry, just sage.properties, is that not correct?

Any other advice?

Why, oh why does WHS not back itself up? It would sure solve some problems for me.

[Moskus]

Just out of curiousity: Was it this error message:
http://forum.wegotserved.com/index.php?showtopic=8768


And have you set up an automatic Library update in Sage?

[gplasky]

Why are there files on your data system drive? There should only be the backup database. Are you not using the drive pool for storage? If not, this is another reason why if it is set up to WHS standards a reinstall would be relatively simple. If all your drives are in the WHS pool doing a reinstall will not touch the media on the pool drives. If you independantly stored files on the D: (data) drive outside of the pool you'll need to copy them somewhere. I'm a little confused if you have a drive pool or not.

So once you sort out how you're going to handle your other files (copy to another drive/system) just do a reinstall. This will not touch the drive pool but will reformat the OS drive. Bring WHS all up to date with PP1 & PP2 and all the security updates before beginning the install of any drivers or applications. Install cards, network tuners and configure and test with any native apps. Then install SageTV. After the install (of the same version as your backup) copy the backup over the new installation. All plugins and configs should be there and work fine.

ANother thing you'll need is patience. Allow WHS to do its thing with the drives. Watch for drive activity and try to allow that to subside before doing any rebooting. Updates will want to reboot. That should be ok. Just keep an eye on the drive activity and when indexing/migrating is occurring. Don't be in a hurry.

Gerry

[taylormadearmy]

Originally Posted by wayner

Any other advice?

It may not help - but before ripping things out and re-installing its always worth checking your memory when having non specific issues like this. Corrupt memory can manifest itself in almost any way...

I use memtest86 http://www.memtest86.com/
Easy to do and can save many hours of tracking down strange issues if it does happen to be your RAM.

Originally Posted by wayner

Why, oh why does WHS not back itself up? It would sure solve some problems for me.

Agreed - it is frankly ridiculous! It also annoys me that the minimum volume size for the sytem disk is 65Gig. If it was smaller you could use a reasonably priced SSD. But the next sized up SSD beyond 65Gig is 128Gig and these are still pricey.

Good luck!
T

[Moskus]

Originally Posted by gplasky

Why are there files on your data system drive?

Because programs are installed on the system drive?

[gplasky]

WHS creates 2 partitions by default. A C: drive (OS drive-20GB) and a D: drive (data drive-the balance left on the system drive.) The C: drive is usually used as the default place for installing the OS and applications. D: is left alone and is no longer used as a landing zone. For the most part D: is used to store the backup database. This also lends itself better to a reinstall. It's been awhile and I can't remember for sure if WHS leaves the data (D: drive) alone for a reinstall. The pool is never referred to as a drive letter and is always accessed through the desktop shared files icon or thru the WHS console.

Gerry

[wayner]

Thanks for the replies folks-

@Moskus - yes it was a "system volume is failing" error but unlike in that thread that you linked to a repair did not fix all of the problems. What do you mean by automatic library update?

@Gerry - Yes I do have a drive pool with a total of 6 drives with 5.2TB of storage. I was under the impression that all of the data pool is essentially treated as one big drive by WHS so that you could have PC backups or data files on the DATA portion of your system drive. In my case this is a 500GB drive so 20GB is the system volume and 480GB is for the data pool. Yes I do store my Sage recordings to the disk pool, but I don't have duplication turned on for TV recordings, although TV recordings that I want to keep get moved to my Video Library where they do get duplicated. So I was worried that it is possible that some of my TV recordings could have been stored on the DATA portion of my system drive. I am pretty sure that there must be something other than backups on the data portion of my SYS drive as it is something like 80% full and I don't think that there is something like 380GB (480*80%) of PC backups as my PCs don't contain much data as I centralize all of this on my WHS. You are right that patience will be required as there will be something like 4.7TB of files that have to be reindexed - which I imagine could take several days. My kids won't be happy with me if they can't access their shows for a while - I will have to make sure that I move some to other local hard drives so that they do have something to watch.

@T - thanks for the suggestion I will try a memory test.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by wayner

Thanks for the replies folks-

@Gerry - Yes I do have a drive pool with a total of 6 drives with 5.2TB of storage. I was under the impression that all of the data pool is essentially treated as one big drive by WHS so that you could have PC backups or data files on the DATA portion of your system drive. In my case this is a 500GB drive so 20GB is the system volume and 480GB is for the data pool. Yes I do store my Sage recordings to the disk pool, but I don't have duplication turned on for TV recordings, although TV recordings that I want to keep get moved to my Video Library where they do get duplicated. So I was worried that it is possible that some of my TV recordings could have been stored on the DATA portion of my system drive. I am pretty sure that there must be something other than backups on the data portion of my SYS drive as it is something like 80% full and I don't think that there is something like 380GB (480*80%) of PC backups as my PCs don't contain much data as I centralize all of this on my WHS. You are right that patience will be required as there will be something like 4.7TB of files that have to be reindexed - which I imagine could take several days. My kids won't be happy with me if they can't access their shows for a while - I will have to make sure that I move some to other local hard drives so that they do have something to watch.

They should all be tombstones. D:\Shares should not have anything except tombstones in a multi-disk system (after it's done its balancing, of course). You might want to verify your DEMigrator.exe is running in the background. The DATA volume is your pool. The D: partition will be labeled as DATA volume and the rest of your drives in your pool will have no label. Are you seeing the D: partition being 80% full or are you seeing the DATA pool being 80% full? The only other time WHS will put files on the D: partition is when your pool starts to run out of space.

Reindexing should take a while but not days.

Gerry

[wayner]

The % full indication that I am mentioning is coming from the Disk Management Addin for WHS. It gives great info including how full each drive is as well as the temperature of each drive. There was a time in the past when my drives were getting full so the system drive was required for data storage. Currently it is not needed as I have 600GB free and the sys drive is a 500GB drive so 480GB (or a bit less given your definition of a GB) is available for data. I am not sure how the balancing works as it does not appear as if it tries to empty out the data portion of the sys drive in the future when you have available space on non-sys drives. If it did then my sys drive should be fairly empty right now.

I have also noticed that when I add new drives to the system that it does not appear to move data from exisitng drives to new drives - it just uses the new drives for new data files. However I do believe someone around here has written a utility to move files amongst the drives in your data pool.

[gplasky]

This is some good reading on how drive extender works:
WHS Tech Brief-Drive Extender
Possibly it is a situation where those files were moved when disk space became low and for whatever reason was not moved out when storage was added. Make sure demigrator isn't disabled for some reason.

On my d drive the space used was only from the backup database. The backup database holds every unique file from all the systems you back up. If you have the same file across 5 different systems it just has one copy of that file in the db. I don't do duplication.

I think it was beefcake that wrote the drive balancer tool.

Gerry

[inlvnv]

wayner, RDP in, "My Computer", D drive, "DE" folder, and "Shares" folder. That will list any "shared" files currently being stored in your D drive data partition.

Edit: Do not remove any files directly from "Shares" folder.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by inlvnv

wayner, RDP in, "My Computer", D drive, "DE" folder, and "Shares" folder. That will list any "shared" files currently being stored in your D drive data partition.

But won't that include all files on any of my six hard drives? What I am worried about is that there are unduplicated files on the 480GB Data portion of my system drive and I would like to move them to one of the non-sys drives before I reinstall.

[gplasky]

No. You're going thru My Computer at the physical drive level. You'll only see what's on D:. To see what is physically on your other drives I think it is C:\fs and then you should see a folder for each physical drive.

Gerry

[wayner]

I see - when I go through d:\DE\Shares\TVShows there is only actually one program - a 9.5GB movie that I recorded 7 months ago. There are also some EDL files from comskip but I can live without those. Am I correct in assuming that files in duplicated folders in d:\DE\Shares will also show up in one of the other physical drives - i.e. c:\fs\E\DE\shares.

Is there any way to then move this file? I guess I could just copy it to another folder that is duplicated, such as Videos and I would safely have the file, correct?

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by wayner

Is there any way to then move this file? I guess I could just copy it to another folder that is duplicated, such as Videos and I would safely have the file, correct?

Correct.

Gerry