Migrate Shares and Backups to New System

From We Got Served Wiki

Sometimes the worst happens, the system drive fails, a reinstall fails to complete and leave the system unable to reinstall again, or the like. All your data is intact, but the system won't work.

Or you may want to just move to a new system drive and don't trust another program to clone the disks to a new hard drive. But you still want to save all your backups and shared data.

What you will need

• Remote Desktop Connection
• A lot of patience (seriously, this may take hours to complete)

What to Do

Well... the best way to do this is to get a clean, vanilla install of Windows Home Server. This means installing it to an empty drive. Whether that be the case because it's new or because you've moved all the data off of it, it doesn't matter. Setup will format the drive, so make sure all other drives are disconnected before installing or you will lose all your data! Once Home Server is fully installed, and you've run the Blue Setup Wizard and installed Power Pack 1, you'll be ready to copy data over. I'm going to cover Shared Data first because there may be some more tricky issues with restoring backups.

I would highly recommend completely reading this article before attempting. And if you have any questions, please click the "Reply" button.

Shared Data

After you've got WHS up and running, you'll need to shut down the system (just to be on the safe side). After it's completely off, reconnect all the drives from the old 'Storage Pool' to the computer. When you turn the computer back on, make sure it is booting the correct hard drive in BIOS.

Once the system is finished booting, open up "My Computer". At this point, you'll notice you have a SYSTEM partition (C:\), and a DATA partition (D:\). Also, your old SYSTEM partition will appear, as will a number of drives labeled DATA equal to the number of drives that were in the old storage pool.

On each hard drive named DATA, there is a hidden folder named "DE". In this folder there are two folders, "shares" and "folders". For now, ignore the "folders" directory. You'll want to open up each drive except for the D:\ drive and do the following:

Copy all the folders in "shared" to either D:\shares or to \\SERVER\sharename (where "SERVER" is your server's name, and "sharename" is the respective shares). Once you've cleared the drive, either just move on to the next drive, or verify which drive you've emptied and add it to the pool. Be careful when adding the drives, as if you add the wrong drive, you will lose the data that was on it.

• Note: If you want to recover the backups, then you'll either need to do that at the same time (copy the files at the same time), or just don't add the hard drives to the storage pool till you're completely done.
• Note: You will likely want to try and force migration off your system drive after you are done recovering your data. Check out the Force Data Migration tutorial for details.

Backups

Backups are definitely a lot more tricky to recover. One missing file can render the entire database useless. Some of the following steps may not be necessary, but I'm including them to make absolutely certain that the backup database is fully recovered and working 100%.

Once your server is up and running, the first thing you will want to do is turn off the "Windows Home Server Backup Service". This is done by running "services.msc", or opening up "Administrative Tools" and launching "Services". The backup service should be towards the bottom. If you have the console open or have a computer already connected, it will immediately throw a fit because the backup service is off. Ignore this for now. We have turned it off to make sure it doesn't screw with the database while we're copying it over.

On each data partition, you're going to want to go back into the "DE" folder, but this time open up "folders". There should be a folder named "{00008086-058D-4C89-AB57-A7F909A47AB4}" here. Copy that folder to "D:\folders\". Most of the files are going to be 4GiB sized. Do this for all the drives in the old storage pool.

Then open "\folders\{378AE094-F4CA-4D9B-BDA5-649D6F738276}" on your old "D:\" drive. There should be a file called "whs.reg". DO NOT merge this file into the registry. You will want to edit this file. We are looking for a few entries. What we want specifically is everything between "[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Home Server\Transport\Clients]" and "[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Home Server\Transport\Server]". This is the registry information for each client connected to the server. Either copy this to a new file (like backups.reg), or delete everything else but these and the first line ("Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00").

Once you've run this modified reg file, and merged it into the registry, it will complete the restore of the previous backups, and all the associated, attached computers. The last step is to restart the service, but I would recommend restarting the computer at this point. Once it's done restarting, you will want to run the backup repair wizard to ensure that the backup database is completely intact. You will also probably have to run "C:\Program Files\Windows Home Server\Discovery.exe" on all your client computers now.

Credits

This page was originally written by Drashna for We Got Served.