I removed and then replaced a hard drive on WHS earlier today. Since there are only 4 internal SATA ports and all my extra USb enclosures don’t work, i had to disconnect one of the drives and connect the drive i was removing. The reason for this was that due to space constraints, the new drive had to go in first so that the Drive remove Wizard could migrate data to it.
Anyway, once I had everything sorted, the Backup Service refused to run. Even after I did everything (clear file conflicts etc) that is suggested in help files, it’s still not running. So as a last resort I went to delete all backups. This is what I got.
I can’t find anything on this anywhere. Any ideas?
I suspect this is some sort of deep problem somewhere in the bowls of WHS. If thats the case, it would indicate a re-install of WHS itself. And thats something which I’m very hesitant to do.
UPDATE: Thanks to alexh on the MediaSmart forums:
I’ve fixed it.
I had already followed the error log paper trail using the Start->Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Event Viewer tool which showed problems with a file on D:
Turns out that all the files in the folder : D:/folders/{00008086-058D-4C89-AB57-A7F909A47AB4} had been corrupted. The error "Device not connected" is a crap error message which actually means "invalid file handle error" caused by corrupted files / filesystem.
I removed the files in this folder then followed Method 5 of http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946339 "Backup Database Repair" and it replaced D:/folders/{00008086-058D-4C89-AB57-A7F909A47AB4}/Commit.dat and everything came back to life.
However, don’t do what I did and delete all the files – this will remove all of your backups. Just rename commit.dat and then run database repair.
On the one hand, I’m stoked to have the backup service back, but on the other sad that so many backups are toast. Sigh.
Random Musings 
If you want to protect your assets on WHS even further and back up your data to Amazon S3 cloud storage, check out CloudBerry Backup add-on for WHS. http://whs.cloudberrylab.com/ . It is one time fee and the rest what you pay for Amazon S3. Besides, there is no proprietary data format and you can access your data using other Amazon s3 tools. Supports all Amazon S3 regions and Reduced Redundancy Storage.
An excellent idea.
Yeah I have thought about cloud storage, but I have 2Tb to backup and it’s a fortune per month on S3.
So I’m hoping prices continue to come down.
Thanks tho
Roberto
Sent from my iPhone
I’m having similar issues with my WHS (a disk failed before I could properly remove it). Now, when I try to repair the database (I don’t care about keeping the backups), the WHS becomes unavailable. It’s been running now for about 12 hours. How long did your database repair take and was your WHS available during that time? I’m not sure if it’s still working away, or it’s locked up. Any suggestions?
I was getting the same type of error whenevere I rebooted my server or logged in with my workstation. I hae tried everytjing until I read this email. My repair of the backup database ran for maybe a minute and then I would be disconnecetd from the WHS console. I did as above, where I renamed the COMMIT.DAT file to another name and then peformed the Backup database repair and the repair worked. The backup service was restarted and I no longer get the critical flag “where the backup service was not started” error. So far so good. I hope this also takes care of my other problem where I goto a workstation that was connected to the WHS via connector and then intermittantly the connector in the tray on the wokstaion would be GRAY. At tha point I am not able to connect to the server. I can ping the server, but can not login via RDP or the connector. I also receive an error when I try to access the shared folders. The ony way to resolve the problem was to hard power down the WHS and then reboot. I have a ACER Asprie Easystore server.
Thanks again for the info and it is nice to know that I did not have to delete any of my backups. Sorry to hear that you did, but becuase of your comments, it spared me, so thanks again.
MAB