Case Study
One bad rebuild attempt. Fixed remotely, in a day.
A Dell server running several Hyper-V virtual machines on Microsoft Storage Spaces went down when a single drive failure was followed by an improper rebuild attempt. Remote consulting diagnosed the fault and guided a safe rebuild — no drives shipped anywhere, and every VM was back within 24 hours.
The case
A single drive failure, then a rebuild that made it worse.
The fault started small: one drive failure in a Microsoft Storage Spaces pool with parity, running on Dell server hardware. Several Hyper-V virtual machines depended on it. Redundancy was built in, so the expectation was a routine fix.
During an attempt to rebalance the array, an improper rebuild was triggered. Within minutes, multiple VMs went offline at once — the CRM system, finance applications and a production database among them. The storage pool refused to mount.
The decision
Ship the drives, or get a specialist on the line first?
The obvious option — pulling the drives and sending them for lab-based recovery — meant days of transit each way, extended downtime, and a risk of further damage in shipping.
Instead, the business called for remote data recovery consulting. The first questions from the specialist were specific and structured: what server platform (Dell PowerEdge), what hypervisor (Hyper-V), what storage configuration had failed (Storage Spaces with parity), and what had already been attempted (one unsuccessful rebuild). For the first time since the crash, there was a plan instead of guesswork.
The recovery
A guided rebuild, done remotely and safely.
- 01
Secure remote session
Connected via Zoho Assist within minutes, giving the consultant direct visibility of system logs, the broken storage pool, and the VHD/VHDX virtual disk structures.
- 02
Diagnosis in under an hour
The misconfiguration preventing the pool from mounting was identified, and the risks of any further rebuild attempt were explained before anything else was touched.
- 03
Step-by-step guided rebuild
The consultant walked the in-house IT team through the correct sequence of recovery actions in Storage Spaces, avoiding the dangerous options that had caused the original failure — monitored, with checkpoints at each stage.
- 04
Array back online, verified
The pool mounted cleanly, stable and without corruption, after a few hours of supervised work.
The outcome
Every VM back within 24 hours — no drives shipped.
All critical virtual machines were operational again within 24 hours of the first call. Staff were back in the CRM system, finance had real-time data, and the production database was back online.
What could have been a multi-day outage was resolved without a single drive leaving the building. It was a chargeable consulting engagement rather than a physical recovery — and set against the cost of extended downtime, it was the cheaper option by far.
A degraded Storage Spaces pool, RAID array or virtualised server is not a DIY job — one wrong step can turn a recoverable fault into a permanent one. Talk to a specialist before you touch it again.