I've had a headless, CD-drive-less, WHS up and running for 5 years with no problems at all. But last week, it simply stopped working. I've tried everything I possibly can to get it to boot, but no joy. It goes into dskchk, gets to stage 4 and freezes. Can't press any keys to skip the diskcheck, and so totally stuck. In the interests of being quick, this is what i've tried so far:
1) Booting into safe mode: freezes at acpitabl.dat. Not good.
2) Create bootable flash drive using Yumi. Run Hiren's boot cd. Hard drive passed Hitatchi drive fitness test & wesern digital life guard diagnostic
3) In mini xp examine chkdsk log file, error message shows unable to continue in read only mode (and hence the crash)
4) So from hiren's boot cd from command prompt run chkdsk /r. No problems found
5) Try to boot into WHS, no good
6) use regedit software to adjust the chkdsk entry to not check volume d:. http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-windows_programs/how-to-disable-the-chkdsk-check-disk-on-start-up/35f58c69-7a6c-4e1b-aec3-26d7131ec643
It still launched chkdsk and crashed
7) Burn iso of my WHS installation disc (as the WHS server has no CD drive, use YUMI to create a bootable version, try to repair WHS, and in the customisation section, there are no available options for currency/time etc. It's simply blank, and then crashes when I click continue. Tried again with fresh ISO. Same issue.
8) Found a recoveryCD.iso on the SYS drive of the harddrive. Burn into bootable usb. BSOD straight away "windows has shut down to prevent hard drive damage"...
So I've tried a lot, with zero success. I'm still not sure I know what the problem is. It feels like something is corrupted in Windows. But the chkdsk issue is with the D:data drive rather than the C:sys drive. Which should lead to safemode working, and it doesn't. WHich in turn suggests it's a drive issue, but the hard drives pass tests on their integrity....
So two questions:
1) Is there anything else that people would suggest to try and get it up and running? Anyone with a WHS iso they know works?
2) I'm about to order two new hard drives. I don't want to lose my shared folders, but happy to temporarily lose the backups as all connected PC's are fine. Has anyone got step by step instruction of how to install WHS on a fresh drive, pull data off a failed drive and get the shared folders to be repopulated.
I've now spent a week of going down blind alleys, the wife is not happy at the prospect of losing the family photos, and I'm slowly going mad staring at a chkdsk screen!
Thanks for your help,
Kevin