WHS - new hard drive

[brownkc]

I just added 2 WD Black 1TB drives and a Promise TX4 SATA300 controller to my WHS. I ran out of room. I already had an identical card in the server so it was detected by the BIOS and WHS and both drives showed up during the BIOS boot and in device manager. I can access the shared folders via the shortcuts on my other computers but the connection software indicates I am not connected. Accessing the computer directly, everything looks okay but when trying to open the disk management folder in the Admin Tools, I only get the message that it is "Loading the Disk Configuration Information.

Since these are brand new drives is it automatically doing a full format? I have been stuck here for a couple of hours. I know from installing a 640GB drive that a full format will take about 2 hours. Is that what is going on now?

 

[Nightrainsrt4]

I couldn't tell you if that is what it is doing but if it is be prepared for more than a two hour wait. Granted mine was running on a 1GB ram 800Mhz P3 1u server, but formatting my 1TB drive took almost overnight (the entire time of sleeping), so I would assume a full format on a 2TB would be quite lengthy as well.

Couldn't find much on Disk Management hanging with "Loading the Disk Configuration Information" other than to run CHKDSK on the OS drive, and to check for extra services enabled like nTune or Adobe Photo Downloader, or things like that as they can be known to cause Disk Management to hang up.

 

[Old Hippie]

I wouldn't do a full format unless I had a problem with the quick format.

Pretty much a waste of time IMHO.

 

[brownkc]

Next morning it was still stuck at the loading screen so I did a restart. Everything went smoothly and I was able to add the drives. As for the full format, I hadn't selected that I was just taking a guess as to what was going on. However, I have started doing a full format if given the option. I read on one of the threads here that a full format will find and map all of the corrupted portions of a hard drive and thus improve long term stability and speed.