Changing WHS System Drive

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bmorton18

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 1, 2008
Messages
442
I built a WHS system last week and I put the system drive on an old 200gb hdd that I had laying around, and I have a 1TB drive in there for storage. I want to replace the old drive and put in a new 1.5tb drive as the system drive and a storage drive. I would prefer not to have to reinstall WHS if possible. Any suggestions?
 
Ok. if I remove the 200gb drive and put in the 1.5tb drive and reinstall WHS, will everything on my other drive still be there or should I manually back it up and just reinstall and copy everything manually?
 
Reinstall with the new disk is your only option. If your data is duplicated on other drives, then it should be safe. After a reinstall, your data is the only thing that will be left intact. Your OS, add-ins, settings will all be wiped.

It sucks, I know. I think a change in WHS system drive is only possible if the replacement drive is the same size otherwise youll run into problems.
 
Welcome to the many joys of WHS.

Microsoft seriously needs to pull its head out in WHS v2 coming this Summer, they better have the ability to make the system drive redundant or at least let people be able to back it up somehow.
 
Last edited:
wait..
you want to replace the system 200gb with a 1.5TB system drive, and replace the 1TB data drive with a 1.5TB data drive?
Wouldnt it be easier to ghost/acronis the system drive from old to new, then do the same with the data drive?
 
a reinstall with the new HDD and the storage pool drive(s) should work. i always have a backup set of data becuase sometimes a reinstall fails and then you need to unplug the storage pool drives, fresh install on the OS drive and then migrate the data over...

PITA i wanted to do a RIAD1 OS drive setup just for this reason but didnt have an extra drive when i did it :(
 
dbwillis said:
wait..
you want to replace the system 200gb with a 1.5TB system drive, and replace the 1TB data drive with a 1.5TB data drive?
Wouldnt it be easier to ghost/acronis the system drive from old to new, then do the same with the data drive?
Click to expand...

Acronis = NO. like i said, welcome to the joys of WHS.

WHS die-hards on other forums get bent out of shape when I mention lack of ability to image the drives as a dealbreaker for me.
 
Oh well, a reinstall isn't too hard to do so I'll just do that when the new drive gets here...
 
just get Hiren's Boot CD uset the pertition option ghost and ghost the os driveto another larger drive just make sure you donet ghost to the pooled drives or you wil loose data
 
Dasimpson said:
just get Hiren's Boot CD uset the pertition option ghost and ghost the os driveto another larger drive just make sure you donet ghost to the pooled drives or you wil loose data
Click to expand...

That will not work
 
Dasimpson said:
why not ?
Click to expand...

I dont know but doing a straight up image does not work. I have done around a 100 whs installs/reinstalls and doing an image to a different disk does not work for some reason.
Look at the other peoples post above.
 
dydx said:
Reinstall with the new disk is your only option. If your data is duplicated on other drives, then it should be safe.
Click to expand...

It will be safe *IF* the WHS recovery-mode installer chooses to recognize the array as a valid WHS array. I found out the hard way that sometimes it decides not to (even if the correct drivers are in place and it can see all the data drives) for reasons known only to itself. Fortunately, one of the advantages of WHS is that the individual drives are still readable, so I was able to manually pull my data off and slowly reconstruct the system. But the lack of transparency and dearth of diagnostic tools available to aid this process leaves me with a feeling of uneasiness about whether I'll be able to recover my WHS (except for the aforementioned manual approach) should the system drive ever fail.
 
I have done around a 100 whs installs/reinstalls
Click to expand...

I'm curious, why soo many?

Your comments have always indicated that you are pleased with the OS.

Are you installing these for customers?
 
Old Hippie said:
I'm curious, why soo many?

Your comments have always indicated that you are pleased with the OS.

Are you installing these for customers?
Click to expand...

Yea i do them for others.

And I have a couple Trial instances in VMs so i can try out things.
I like to try to do unsupported things to WHS to figure out what it can really handle...in the process things tend to get screwed up a lot.

Ive only reinstalled my production environment about 6 times. (Due to Hardware changes)
 
nitrobass24 said:
Yea i do them for others.

And I have a couple Trial instances in VMs so i can try out things.
I like to try to do unsupported things to WHS to figure out what it can really handle...in the process things tend to get screwed up a lot.

Ive only reinstalled my production environment about 6 times. (Due to Hardware changes)
Click to expand...

Tons of experience.

I wish I knew what you know. :)
 
well just put another 256mb in the server and well running how it should do now just wish media streaming worked with wmp11
 
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