Bringing Sexy Back

As I posted last week, I had selected the Drobo as my new storage mechanism at home. However, all of my data was still (hopefully) imprisoned on the no longer sentient server. Windows Home Server uses a custom RAID like software setup to duplicate information across multiple drives.

It is simple stupid in usage. But, when I attempted to boot those drives in another machine I had no success.
The system just wasn't having it. After spending some quality time on that approach with no luck whatsoever, I tried to just attach the drive to my main computer.

I had purchased one of those external SATA/USB drive converters some time ago from the folks at New Egg. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to try it out. Unfortunately after hooking it up, I saw none of my data was there. After recovering from a mild-panic, I set about Googling for the answer.

Thankfully, one of the enthusiast sites for Home Server had just the detail I was looking for. The recovery got much faster from there. I removed the data from each drive and copied it to the Drobo. Once the copy was complete, ironically, I removed that drive from the USB dock and put it right back into the Drobo.

I was able to recover everything off of each drive. I did have some duplicates because of the way it was stored. However, this is a case, where I would rather have dupes than nothing at all.