Fix Windows 2003 lost share after drive letter change (back)

I´m afraid you need to recreate all shares.

A f***.

Any place to look for the exact names of the shares?

Let me make sure I understand this correctly...

You had a data volume on a specific drive letter, that had a share on it.  You changed the drive letter, then changed it back to the original drive letter, but now the share is gone?

Is the data still there?

Is this a share you set up with a custom name(i.e. 'share1, share2$), or is it one of the admin shares(i.e. \\servername\d$)?

Do you have a backup solution in place?

Are you familiar with NTFS permissions?  If so, assuming the data is still there, are the NTFS permissions still in place?  You can view this by checking the 'Security' tab on the Properties of a folder or file within the share

Spyder - I tried to clone the drive to a larger RAID array, but when booted, the array had a different letter.

I plugged in the original array, and have now managed to return the shares in place (as the letter was recognised the same.

NTFS permissions are in place, but I am not sure about share permissions. - The shares in Q are not administrative ones, but the manually made shares.

I am seeking for an option to move partition to another array with leaving drive letter the same. - Which is proving difficult, and I have only hours of time left.

I think thats problem is, has changed drive and losts all shares but data still remains. Windows 2003 can not backup shares, but data can be backed up. You can try to (on a test environment) using a restore of system state, but I think that not works.

As Drashiel stated, you may want to try a system state restore on the server with the original array attached(original drive letters and data).  I found this support TID on Microsofts site stating that Windows Server 2003 shares and share permissions can be backed up and restored via the registry... a system state restore SHOULD restore your registry to it's original state, hopefully restoring your shares and their permissions.

**Caveat, this is an old article, and it has been a few years since I worked heavily with Windows 2003, so make sure the backups you have of the server and the data volumes are good, before doing the system state restore... as of right now, you still have the server and data, with NTFS permissions in place.... I would think it would be much easier to recreate the shares/share permissions than try to recover data and restore NTFS permissions.

MS Support article on backing up and restoring 2003 shares via the registry:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/125996

Thanks!! :-)