We have Windows Server 2012 software running on an HP Proliant server that lost the system disk over the weekend. I saw some disk errors on Friday and ordered a replacement drive to be delivered on Monday. I checked in Windows Server Backup and noticed that there were numerous backups of the system. I thought that I had stopped the scheduled backups. So I left for the weekend planning on replacing and restoring the system disk on Monday.
Monday morning the server was down because the system disk had completely failed and won't mount. So I booted from the distribution DVD and looked at the available backups. Nothing was displayed on the System Image recovery.
I moved the drive over to another Windows 2012 server and looked with backup. There were only 2 backups, both over the weekend with the C: drive not having a backup (because of drive errors?). None of the previous backups were on the drive.
The system disk only contains the OS and applications. All application data is kept on a storage space array on the same machine. The storage array is working fine and I don't wish to mess with it.
So I went to a drive with older backups. I attempted to restore using the booted distribution. I excluded the storage array and got a message saying that I had excluded a critical disk so the restore would not proceed. I forced the storage array offline with diskpart and got the same restore message. Then I physically removed all of the storage array disks and got a message about "failed to find enough suitable disks".
I went to another Windows server and mounted the backup disk. The most recent backup has only AD, FRS, Registry, System Reserved, System State. The older backup has AD, Bare Metal, Development (the storage array), Exchange, FRS, Local disk (C:), Registry, System Reserved, System State.
I tried restoring the "Local disk (C:)" item to an empty disk, but I could not get the disk to boot. I used bootrec to set up the boot information, but the HP red screened on power-up indicating it can't find a bootable drive. What did I do wrong?
My thought was to restore the C: drive, bring the AD up to date with DSRM, and add the software updates. I don't seem to be able to accomplish this. Does anybody have any ideas on how to get this machine back running?