Server Crash! Help!

[nimrodel]

Nope. This is her own laptop, not a domain client.

[nimrodel]

Good luck with that. Hopefully you will have better luck than me. It might be that I could have got the backup restored eventually but the problem was that each attempt took several hours and I'm only working there 3 hrs a day for 3 days a week. I was worried that 2 weeks later (which is less than 20 hrs) I would still be messing about trying to restore the backup. It only took 30 mins to install Server 2012R2 and maybe an hour to get the roles working. At this point they have internet access and I can access the server remotely so for me that is a better outcome.

[Blue_Cookeh]

Lesson learnt anyway. System backup, state backup and data backup from now on. Oh, and no RAID! I think it's more trouble than it's worth.

 

I wouldn't think like that . RAID is amazing when you come to have a failed disk, but you ran into the exact trap I did when I didn't really know much about it. If you're not monitoring disk health/failures then it just breaks things further, if you are, it's a god send.

 

There should be some management agents you can install like Intel RAID Utility, or Dell OpenManage that will alert you via e-mail when the health of a drive degrades. This is the time to get a RAIDed drive replaced, not when you come to find out both have failed

 

Funnily enough it was this scenario that led me to implementing DFS-R, failover DHCP etc. Bit stupid I didn't in hindsight really since we had the hardware ready for it. Now we can lose one of our servers (with RAID, and backups, and replication) and I don't even need to restore it since everything will automatically fail over to our secondary DC.

Edited December 16, 2015 by Blue_Cookeh

[pantscat]

You should be able to mount the VHD file in Disk Management on your new server - then you can grab the old DHCP database (which will restore your DHCP settings), and also any other files you need.