If you're not restoring you're not backing up

Windows Server has this neat feature: Storage Pools. In a nutshell it separates the logical storage from physical devices. I use it to make two physical hard drives appear as one logical disk. Anything saved to the pool is mirrored to both disks. In theory, this means that a failure of one physical drive won't loose any data since a copy is available on the second.

Last week I had a drive failure. It wasn't either of the drives in the storage pool. Instead the system drive (a third drive hosting the OS) had failed.

I think it took me 40 minutes to be up and running enough to validate the data was okay.

1. Install replacement system disk
2. Reinstall Windows Server 2012 R2
3. Reconnect two physical disks hosting the storage pool
4. Trawl the interwebs for details of how to reattached the storage pool

Job done (except for the reboots and updates and reboots and updates thing...).

One trick, Windows server doesn't automatically mount a newly attached pool on reboot. Here'e the PowerShell rune to chnage that:

Get-VirtualDisk | Where-Object {$_.IsManualAttach –eq $True} | Set-VirtualDisk –IsManualAttach $False

I saw a BSOD today, oh boy, first in a while.

1. Grab WinDBG(x64) — install the Windows Software Development Kit (from here for 8.1) and select the debugging tools in the installer.
2. Launch WinDbgx64
3. Set the Symbol Search Path to SRV*C:\Windows\symbol_cache*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols
4. Save the workspace
5. Load the .dmp file
6. !analyze -v

For a windbg cheat sheet try https://labs.snort.org/awbo/windbg.txt

WinDbg howto and another

For memory related suspicions try memtest for memteat.org — you'll need a bootable something with it on...

For driver relateds suspicions follow the instructions to verify the drivers.