I've been using DrivePool on a WHS 2011 machine with four 2 TB hard drives for over 5 years without any problems. Today, the server wouldn't boot up because it couldn't detect the boot drive (2 TB Hitachi drive, Oct-2011 date of manufacture). I went into BIOS and the boot drive was not detected there. I tried swapping SATA cables and connecting the boot drive to another computer, a Windows 7 build, but the hard drive does not show up in BIOS.
So is it safe to assume the hard drive is dead? Unfortunately, I have no backup of this drive and I was not using file duplication in DrivePool. So even if I do a fresh install of WHS 2011 and DrivePool, is my entire data across the 4 hard drives corrupted? What's my best course of action now?
Thanks in advance for any help or suggestions! This really is the nightmare scenario for me and I really should've had a backup of the boot drive.