Had a data drive fail on HP EX475. The drive was the 3rd in the system and contained the bulk of the backup data from a PC to which I no longer have access. Did not have BDBB set to duplicate backups and am not ready to give up on salvaging them. Since I don't have the old computer "blow away the database and run a new backup" isn't an option. I was able to get an image (including all files in DE directory) from the failed drive, purchased an exact make/model of replacement drive and imaged the data over to the new drive. When I place the new drive in the system it is not recognized as being part of the pool and the hard drive light flashes Blue and the console wants me to add it to the pool.
Have been crawling through the Registry to see if there is a way to spoof WHS into thinking the new drive is the old drive. I found a (scrambled) drive serial number entry and updated to the new drive serial number but that isn't sufficient. Anyone know how/where WHS stores the drive info and if there is a way to modify the configuration to have it treat the new drive as already added to the pool?
As an alternate, if I allow WHS to add the new drive to the pool (thereby formatting the drive), then re-copy the recovered data to the new drive (from an external drive), will the backup database know to access data from the new drive? If I try to access the folder data on the D: drive that physically resides on the E: drive I get "handle is invalid" messages so another thought is whether there is a way to update the file handles.
In short, is there any way to actually recover backup data when a drive has failed? I've seen "no" several places using Google but it seems pretty straightforward that if DE is just sticking some backup .dat files on one drive and some on another that there should be a way to re-link everything.