Windows Home Server (WHS) cyclic redundancy check error

Question

I have received a cyclic redundancy check error on my Windows Home Server (WHS v1) for eight files.

I followed these steps to repair it (found on SU)

1. Run eventvwr.msc and go to the System section
2. Find any errors thrown by 'disk'
3. Look at properties of error and determine which disk errored (disk 0).
4. Go to Disk Management under Control Panel | Admin | Computer Management and find drive
5. Run checkdisk.

Chkdsk ran during a reboot and found/repaired some errors. After reboot four of the files still have CRC errors. The disk appears to be failing.

Now this is the part that I don't get. The four files are movies of my child as an infant. I had data duplication enabled for WHS because they are very important to me and I did not want to lose them in case of a disk failure. I tried to copy the files off of the system, but I get an error that the disk cannot be found (only for these files).

What is going on? If the files are duplicated, shouldn't there be a good copy somewhere? Is there any way to rescue my files? Thanks for any help you can provide.

Answer 1

Well I didn't rescue my files. This is what I tried in case other people want it for reference. Instructions came from WHS official support forum.

Reinstall WHS (failed)

First I copied all my data off of WHS to a spare drive, because at this point I didn't trust WHS to keep things safe.

Next I removed the bad OS drive.

Then I installed a new OS drive and reinstalled WHS. I made sure that I picked "reinstall" and NOT new install. What this should have done was preserved all my files, but required setting the clients back up, reinstalling plugins, and restoring any custom settings. Instead... after booting into the reinstall every single one of my files was gone. Thank GOODNESS I backed up to another drive. WHS can die in a fire.

Alternate Approach

From reading more, I think this is what I should have tried instead.

1. Remove all data drives from WHS system
2. Attach each drive to a working computer
3. Find the hidden DE directory (this is important)
4. If data duplication is on then at least one of these other drives should have the file on it in the DE directory. Hopefully it is recoverable.

In addition, WHS failed to notify me of a failing drive. From system viewer I can see the drive was throwing errors for two months, yet WHS remained silent. Only once my files had become corrupted did I get any warning at all from WHS.

Restored My Corrupted Files

So despite WHS screwing up as mentioned above, I was able to recover the files through a program called Recuva. I ran a deep scan for *.mov files on one of my data drives. Recuva found and restored it. This took about six hours for a 2TB drive.