First time on the forum, I apologize if this has been previously convered. After a year of stable use, I began having problems connecting with two of three home computers to WHS 2011, After a lot of failed attempts, I gave up and re-installed WHS from scratch.
Unfortunately, re-installing deleted everything from the D: drive, home to all photos, music and video. My external 2G WD drive that was supposed to be backing up WHS is dead. I stripped the WD drive out of the enclosure and mounted the SATA drive in the computer, but it shows as uninitialized. WD Diag says it has too many bad sectors to test.
So here I am, after making the biggest computer maintenance blunder of my life. I ran a trial version of a recovery utility that did make some progress identifying lost files on the re-partitioned D: drive. It's about $70 for the utility.
I pullled the C; / D: primary drive to avoid any more damage, and reloaded WHS a second time to a new drive. In this setup, I will leave only the OS on that drive, and install a separate 1T data drive.
Long story short, looking for recommendations for recovering EVERYTHING that I set up WHS to protect! I think cloud based backup is in my future, advice about foolproof WHS backup would also be appreciated.
-dhs