We recently had what appears to be an unrecoverable failure with one of our DX4000 4-drive boxes. After multiple attempts to do a System Restore with a USB key we could not get beyond an system failure error message (0x9) on the LED readout.
WD kindly sent a new box, we plugged in the 4 drives from the failed box and got the same message, and the same inability to restore the OS. The conclusion from this is a disk issue affecting the OS that could not be be fixed, somewhat surprising for a RAID drive. I suspect a problem with corruption of the OS and/or a problem with the OS partition.
WD Support suggested we try to read the drives with a Linux OS, so we used software from Diskinternals that claims to read a  Linux drive (connected through a USB-SATA drive adapter) but that showed unreadable Linux partitions for all four drives. This is probably not a suprise for RAID drives.
To make a long story short, we assembled a virtual RAID configuration by attaching all four drives through USB ports on one computer and, with the Diskinternals RAID Recovery software we were able to extract the contents of the Client Computer Backups folder on D: drive to another, large single SATA drive.
Now what? Does this one folder have all the necessary data to enumerate the different computers and backups involved in the data? Can we just copy the contents to one of our new DX4000 devices and see all the backups? Or, do we need to try and extract more files from the old drives?
Thanks for any ideas. A little concerned going forward, so I guess we will need to backup the backups somewhere, but then we have the same issue: how much do we need to baclup to be able to do a restore from a failed DX4000?
You might actually ask the end of this question over here. http://www.wegotserved.com/ Someone over there may have tried restoring just the backups.
With V.1 we used to backup the backups but I never tried to restore one. (Just the PC backups). I only use the 4/2tb box so I can use windows server backup to do a complete restore. The headless wizard works for this. Over 2tb of disc and you are out of luck. The newer DS boxes do not have the 2tb limit.
Just out of curiosity, you are going through a lot of trouble to recover the backups. Microsoft always figured you would not lose your PC and the backups at the same time, so you could just start over with fresh backups.Â
Thanks, I will try the question at that forum as well.
I looked at the data files in a working DX4000 and there seems to be information on each backup, so perhaps just copying the contests of the Client Backups folder to a working device will do the trick. I am also having WD Support queried to see what they say.
Murphy is alive and well, it turns out we need to restore one computer and also lost the DX4000 at the same time.
In the future, I hope that periodically saving just this folder to an external USB drive will suffice, even if the subject DX4000 goes up in a puff of smoke.
Will report back with any progress on this subject.
Like I said. We used to backup that folder with an add-in. But I am not sure if you just put the backed up backups back on the same box, that already had the machines or if you built a new box it would populate?
on V.2 (what you have) it is posible they would show up under acrchived computers. Suppose I should try it some day
The moderator there pointed me to a freeware solution, copied below.
That software allowed me to browse the database and create a VHD for the computer and dated backup I wanted to get.
Still left with a question as to how to import all of the restored backups to the new DX4000. There does not appear to be a way to do this through the Storage server UI, but perhaps there is a command line that could do it. Simply copying all of the restored files to the new server is likely to overwrite some file and break the database on the new server.
Likely Storage Server has a database program imbedded but I am not clever enough to find it anywhere.
As for the client database… you’d need a server up and running to read the files…Â
However, Alex from CoveCube (StableBit) does have a POTENTIAL solution. He wrote a utility that can dump the backups to VHDs. However, this is “per backup per machine”. So it’s not a very good solution for recovering everything. But it may work to get the most recent.
Good stuff. Used to drink Beers with those fellows at MVP summit
They also should have an answer on stopping the backup services and copying the entire folder over and it would overwrite. I think you would need to connect all the machines first though.
In the end, I obtained another DX4000 device, deleted the contents of the Client Computer Backups directory and copied the recovered files from the failed DX4000 device onto that directory. The new DX4000 complained about errors in the database, I ran the fixup program and then was presented in the “Computers and Backup” section of the Dashboard with an “Archived Computer Backups” listing. Due to the quirks of the software, one cannot actually get a listing of the individual Archived Backups unless one re-connects the backed-up computer to the DX4000 device.
The CoveCube software discussed above is useful for getting a list of the computers in the database, in case you did want to reconnect them. In my case, I had gone ahead and setup yet another DX4000 and connected the computers to it.
In any case, kind of a Happy Ending, but lost of hoops to jump through.
