Home server woes

[freebie]

Hi all, my home server died on me tonight, looking for some help and advice if anyone can. The motherboard is dead it seems I've checked all the normal stuff but nothing, light comes on but no response to pressing power button, tried a spare PSu I had lying around and still nothing. Annoyingly I was saving up for a new one to replace this but looks like my wallet didn't grow quick enough.

In there I had a star tech PCI raid card with 2x1tb hdds mirrored in raid1, how can I get to the data on these drives? I have a hdd caddy but was worried about just plugging it in?

Secondly I had 2 other hard drives set up as a spanned volume in windows (home server 2012) is there anyway I can get the data back from that volume? Windows itself was installed on another hdd in the machine.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. The

 

[Disparia]

Nothing special about RAID-1, I've always been able to read the data off a drive in another system when I didn't feel like installing the RAID controller. Luckily, even if something goes horribly wrong, you still have another one with the data.

Same for the the spanned volumes. I'd install the drives in another system and Windows will more than likely pick them up as a spanned volume.

Of course, I'm used to moving drives around and I know my systems rather well. Take it slow, perhaps even wait for perspectives from other posters before trying anything.

 

[Aquinus]

Your best bet would be to put the drives and RAID card into a working machine running Windows. It should just pick up from where it left off. The RAID card will read the RAID info from the disks and know that they're in RAID. Windows will know things are in RAID (if using software RAID) because it too stores the same kind of RAID information to the disks. As a result, moving the disks to a machine with a compatible RAID controller will typically be able to simply start using a RAID once it's attached. This is true for LSI and Intel RAIDs, several more work this way as well but not from my experience.

 

[freebie]

Thanks guys for your help.

Tried one of the mirrored drives in a caddy and my laptop couldn't read it, could see it was a 1tb disk but thats it, am going to try putting the raid card and hdd's in my other pc and hopefully be able to read them to suck data off.

My other question was, which i meant to write last night but was in too much of a state :-( , should i try connecting everything back up with a different motherboard and hope windows server does some magic and sorts itself out?

 

[newtekie1]

I assume you are talking about WHS2011, which is based on Sever 2008 R2. The good thing is that it is a very light install, it doesn't load a lot of drivers. Mostly just basic drivers for most hardware, and the normal storage drivers and network drivers. So you can try connecting the drives to a new motherboard and see if it is able to boot.

 

[rtwjunkie]

My other question was, which i meant to write last night but was in too much of a state :-( , should i try connecting everything back up with a different motherboard and hope windows server does some magic and sorts itself out?

If you were also doing server backups of the OS, like WHS 2011 prompts, you should be able to put a new motherboard in there and at the very worst do a restore if it won't recognize it and start working. At the best, it may sort itself out like @newtekie1 said.