Fileserver Offline

I came home late and my little one told me he could not reach the fileserver. I go downstairs to take a look and as I get close to HV-01 I can hear a hard drive spinning like mad. It is super loud. A quick check confirms that the HV-01 is offline even though it is powered up and that hard drive is trying to claw it's way out of the case. I power it off and then back on. BIOS loads and says there is no boot device. Uh oh!

I pull the operating system drive out of the HV-01 and connect it to an external USB drive bay connected to my computer. When I try to power it on this way the sounds are no longer just loud, but terribly unhealthy sounding.

Certainly a dead hard drive. Can you believe my HV-01 was still running the operating system on spinning rust? That's how ancient my machine is. That little 500GB hard drive sure gave me my money's worth. I bought this drive in January of 2012, that's amazing!

So I pop over to Microcenter and pick up a Samsung 870 EVO 1TB hard drive for cheap. An SSD, how excited! I've finally brought my fileserver into the 2010's!

When I get home with the drive, I stick a USB thumb drive in my desktop and run Rufus to load Windows Hyper-V 2019 Standalone on to it. While that works I can start working on mounting my new hard drive.

Well this is weird, the mounting screws I have don't fit this SSD. What a bummer! I have tons of different screws laying around from over the years and I find some screws that do fit. I think they're supposed to be motherboard mounts but it's good enough for my old machine. They're holding the drive in place and it's an SSD so there isn't any real concern if it vibrates a little right?

I disconnect all of my data drives from the motherboard, and the connect the USB drive with Windows Server on it. I'm able to work through the installation wizard and then set my network settings to mirror the old fileserver's network settings. I then change the hostname to HV-01 and then reboot. I then add it to my domain.local domain. After another reboot I verify I can reach the server remotely I shut HV-01 down again so that I can reconnect all of my data drives to the motherboard. Once it boots up I can see it is only recognizing seven of the eight data drives. Ugh, these late night repairs always stink.

At this point HV-01 is back up and running, and the fileserver virtual machine is as well, just with one missing data drive. It is so late and I am so tired, this will have to be good enough for tonight. I'll figure out what's wrong with drive eight tomorrow.