Replacing WHS Boot Drive

TechLarry

TechLarry

RIP [H] Brother - June 1, 2022
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Aug 9, 2005
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I've got a pretty good handle on WHS, but this one has me a bit stumped, and hours of research on the Net haven't really helped clear things up.

I used a Win2K Server for several years with six 300GB Barracuda's, and a 120GB Boot Drive. A year or so ago pulled Win2K Server off, changed all the drives back to single volumes, and installed Windows Home Server.

Everything has worked fine.

These six 300GB drives are getting a bit old and have run out of warranty. In fact one of them failed and I replaced it with a new 500GB about 6 months ago.

I'm starting to swap these tired old drives out and replacing them with Western Digital 1TB Green drives. To be honest, I've lost faith in Seagate reliability...

I did three of them last month. Just removed the first three 300GB drives from the pool, added the 1TB drives, formatted them, and added them back to the pool. No problems.

I'm doing two more this morning.

That will leave the one 500GB drive left, and the boot 120GB drive.

Next month, I'm going to do one of two things:

Replace the 500GB 6th drive and the 120GB drive with two more 1TB Green drives (hell, they may be down to $75 by then :)).

or

Buy one more 1TB drive, replace the 500GB with it, and move the 500GB to boot drive duties.

Given Seagate reliability lately, I will probably do the former and be done with the Seagates altogether.

Now, here's the tricky part.

How the hell do you replace a WHS boot drive without losing everything?

I've read that Acronis works, and I've read that Acronis does NOT work. I've read that the tombstones make it so no sort of imaging will work.

I've also read you have to reinstall WHS fresh on the new drive as a Reinstall, wihich will maintain the data in the pool drives, but you lose all your accounts in the process.

Surely it can't be this hard?
 
I used disk imaging tools to separate the two partitions that were in one virtual disk into two seperate virtual disks with no issues using an old version of ghost (8.2).

I ghosted the boot partition making no changes in its size (I initially installed WHS into a virtual disk with an 80 GB size limit), leaving it at 20 GB. I then ghosted the second partition onto a new 300 GB virtual drive.

In my situation that was the only drive in place at the time, and I didn't have any data on the WHS yet. A long as whatever image software you use doesn't mess with the NTFS junctions and just transfers them as is, it should work even with data in place. That does rule out using Microsoft's Imagex from the WAIK...

It might be worth checking out the forums at http://www.wegotserved.co.uk/ for further info. I'm sure somebody over there has done something similar. Somebody hacked a Thecus 5200 NAS to run WHS instead of Linux with a full instructions list...
 
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Been there. This process ain't pretty :)

I think I'll just wait to replace both the last 2 drives with 1TB Green's, and then do a reinstall install of WHS. I guess it scans the storage JBOD and re-creates all the tombstones during the process. I bet that's gonna take a while :)

I'm currently backing up the entire server onto this stack of used 300GB Barracuda's, so I'll have a backup if something goes wrong.
 
I'm actually just about to do this myself, my WHS was originally four 200GB drives and the one that is dying (according to SMART) is the boot drive of course. So I added a 1.5TB drive, removed three 200GB (too much heat) and now I need to replace the boot (with another 1.5TB I bought making it only two 1.5's). After reading up as you did I still haven't decided between the reinstall or imaging. Let me know how it goes.
 
You can just pull the drive out, put in a new one. Then do a server reinstallation. All your data is preserved. You'll have to setup user accounts and any addons you had.

If your data all has duplication on you won't lose any data.
 
Archer75 said:
You can just pull the drive out, put in a new one. Then do a server reinstallation. All your data is preserved. You'll have to setup user accounts and any addons you had.

If your data all has duplication on you won't lose any data.
Click to expand...

Is duplication required to be on? I have it on but it says there isn't enough room for duplication because I have a 200GB drive and a 1.5TB drive. I guess I can add one of the 200GB back in temporarily.
 
OldPueblo said:
Is duplication required to be on? I have it on but it says there isn't enough room for duplication because I have a 200GB drive and a 1.5TB drive. I guess I can add one of the 200GB back in temporarily.
Click to expand...

Well to ensure the data on the boot drive, or more specifically the D parition, exists on another drive. So when you pull that drive that data isn't lost then I would turn duplication on.

There is a script someone wrote to move that data off that partition but i've never used it.
 
The OP's dream of $75 WD green 1TB drives is about to come true. fry's has them for $79.99

I'm going to try ghosting my 80GB drive to another drive and see if it works or not.
 
Archer75 said:
Well to ensure the data on the boot drive, or more specifically the D parition, exists on another drive. So when you pull that drive that data isn't lost then I would turn duplication on.

There is a script someone wrote to move that data off that partition but i've never used it.
Click to expand...

Yeah that's exactly what I've been wondering, does it offload it to a different drive whenever there's room and fail the duplication back on the primary drive, etc. I'll just add one back in and play it safe.
 
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