enigma54

OK thanks again for the reply. So working on the assumption that the OS HDD is dead, I'm planning to buy a replacement HDD, likely a SSD this time (recommend a particular brand?) and I'll use this solely for the OS and not as part of the pool. I'll then follow your steps to re-install WHS 2011 and DrivePool and then reconnect all the HDD's. I'll also see about looking for a backup solution for the server itself. I'll try and find a service that can perhaps recover the data, especially on the partition that was part of the pool. Assuming I can recover this data, would I simply be able to copy all the DP files to a new HDD and DrivePool will recognize the recovered data as part of the pool?

Thanks for the step-by-step guide! Unfortunately, I think the OS HDD was part of the pool. I don't remember exactly because I set this up over 5 years ago, but at the very least, I seem to remember partitioning the OSS drive into a 60Meg boot partition and put the second partition into the drive pool. In hindsight, that was pretty dumb. So in this scenario, what happens to the data on the other drives? Corrupted?

I've been using DrivePool on a WHS 2011 machine with four 2 TB hard drives for over 5 years without any problems. Today, the server wouldn't boot up because it couldn't detect the boot drive (2 TB Hitachi drive, Oct-2011 date of manufacture). I went into BIOS and the boot drive was not detected there. I tried swapping SATA cables and connecting the boot drive to another computer, a Windows 7 build, but the hard drive does not show up in BIOS. So is it safe to assume the hard drive is dead? Unfortunately, I have no backup of this drive and I was not using file duplication in DrivePool. So even if I do a fresh install of WHS 2011 and DrivePool, is my entire data across the 4 hard drives corrupted? What's my best course of action now? Thanks in advance for any help or suggestions! This really is the nightmare scenario for me and I really should've had a backup of the boot drive.