Main server OS corrupted

[Dave Ford]

Hi folks,

I have an old Acer Easystore H340 that's running Windows Home Server (yes, it's THAT old). This is a HEADLESS NAS box and recently it dropped off my home network.  I tried all sorts of things to get video on it (including purchasing a debug cable/board that has VGA), to no avail.

Today I ripped the drives out and stuck them in my home PC to try to see what's going on.  I can get to the Windows Home Server loading screen, but then it blue screens and reboots in an endless loop.  I'm pretty sure the O/S has been corrupted and I'm thinking of re-installing the O/S on a new hard drive.

My issue - The other hard drives from the EasyStore H340 that contain all my data are unreadable on my home PC running Win 10 as they're in a raid array in the EasyStore H340.  If I re-install the O/S on a new hard drive, can I just plug it in to the EasyStore and it'll read my data drives?  Or is that data lost forever (I'm really hoping this is not the case). 

[#2]

77 Views and not a single reply.

Update on this:

I was able to install Windows Home Server 2011 on this headless device thanks to an amazing post here: https://homeservershow.com/forums/topic/4229-whs2011-on-an-acer-h34x/

It walked me through the tricks...  I was able to back-up my DATA drives elsewhere and have now installed them into the unit.  Windows Home Server 2011 sees the drives (called DATA), but when you use explorer to hopefully view the files, there's nothing there.

There has to be some 'trick' to get Windows Home Server 2011 to read the files from these DATA drives.  Anyone know?

[#3 · Accepted solution]

Update: Thanks to this post: https://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/cf354b5d-b37b-4b7f-a0d5-8e573697777f/how-to-recover-data-a...

I've been able to recover all of my data.

If anyone else has one of these Acer Easystore servers running Windows Home Server 2003, this thread should help you out.

[#4]

@Dave Ford Hello! Sorry for the hassle. For future reference, these AMAs are intended for live events only, which is likely why you didn't get any responses. The best place to ask Windows Server questions, when it's not during an AMA, is our main Windows Server space (where I have moved your post to).