I have had a WHS since 2007, an original HP MediaSmart server, and it served me well until very recently. I went away on a trip for a month and when I came back my server wouldn't start up. I could turn it on, but ultimately the health light would blink red/blue intermittently for about 30 seconds and then it just blinked blue (no red) ad nausea. I'm not technical, but what I could understand from the many forums I read was that it was a likely check disk and/or disk corruption error. The one solution they offered that wasn't too technical to try to remove disks one by one and try restarting. I did, but unfortunately I got the same result each time.
So I took my server hard drives to staples, and they harvested all the data from the WHS hard drives to a separate external HD. The good part of this is that I now can access all of the files I had put in the separate server folders - photos, videos, important docs, etc. But all of the files and information that were located in my computer backups now appear as .dat files and I have no clue of how to get to them. Is there any way to do this that a non-technical person might be able to do? I'm fine at following step-by-step instructions even if they're complicated, but they'd need to be really well drawn out. I still have the original server and hard drives....is there a solution that I can reboot up that system and get to the files like I used to?
Thanks all so much for your help! I feel entirely at lost with this and there are a lot of important files (pictures and tax documents, mostly) that were only located on my computer backups, and I need a way to get to them.