I got a message from home today that our Home Server (Lenovo D400 WHS2011) was beeping, so I had my son power it off. When I got home, I pressed the power button to start it, but the system status LED never stopped blinking, I presume indicating that it was in an endless boot process. I powered it back off.
I pulled the drives one-by-one to read the SMART data from them. The 160GB OS drive was fine, as was the first of the two 2TB data drives. When I got to the third drive - a second 2TB data drive (Seagate ST2000DL003), I noticed that it didn't even spin up. No sound but a beep every 1.5 seconds or so.
I removed the bad drive's PCB to check for a blown Transient Voltage Supressor (TVS) diode, but everything on the board looked perfect. I'm figuring the drive and its data to be gone. The shame of it is that our family's schedule had gone nuts and I had had to postpone getting a duplication system set up. Fortunately, most of our family-critical data IS duplicated/backed up in a few places, but I believe there was a small amount of somewhat important data that had been added since the last duplication. I also have a bunch of my data duplicated in a scattered fashion on other media, but it may take some time to find what's missing and where else it might be. I'm resigned to the inevitability that some data will be lost forever.
I'm running Stablebit Drivepool, and here are some of my questions:
1. Was the OS (WHS2011) supposed to boot even though one of the data drives didn't spin up? Wouldn't it have just acted like the drive wasn't connected?
2. What happens if I hold out the failed drive and boot the system up with the 'good' drives?
3. How do I handle the pool? Do I risk losing any data on the good data drive?
3. Does Drivepool or WHS2011 keep an index of all the pooled and/or shared files that were spread across the pooled data drives? Is it something I can access to compare with the files that are still on the remaining data drive to make copying the missing files back in a bit simpler? Any suggestions in this area?
Any other advice regarding considerations I may not have mentioned?
Thanks!