computer support, pc tricks and tips

Any know how I can replace the primary disk on a windows home server machine?

post on my blog about my experience installing windows home server experience

In this post going to mainly write about how Windows Home Server (WHS) handles storage.
Ok, normally in windows every hard drive added and formatted has its own drive letter for each partition .This can become a real pain to administer eventually i.e. multiple shares on multiple drives with multiple partitions.
Of course one can combine partitions on a server into one spanned volume using “Disk Manager”, but this means converting your hard drives into dynamic disks, which are a real pain for many reasons.
Anyway more importantly if a hard drive in a spanned volume fails you lose ALL data on the spanned volume, few people use spanned volumes as a result unless they don’t care about data loss.
W.H.S. uses “single folder namespace” in human language this means.
All drives are used together as one, data is spread across all drives in the “single folder namespace”.
Assuming the server has more than drive installed.
During WHS installation the drive set as the first hard drive in the servers boot order in the BIOS has a 20 GB Windows partition the rest of the space is used for the “primary data partition”
If the server has more than one drive installed the WHS installation will insist on formatting and using them as secondary data partitions.
The primary data partition is used as a landing pad for incoming file data, the data is then spread evenly across all data partitions in the server, where possible since any size drive can be added to WHS.
Please note you can’t select a particular installation location at the start of setup
Also please note, if you add a additional hard or drives to a server while a Windows Home Server installation is still not completed, for instance if during one of the many reboots required a hard drive or drives is added to the server. That drive or drives will be formatted at the end of the installation without asking.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you
Once WHS has been installed successfully only the Windows and the primary data partition will be visible in explorer, the secondary data partitions are only visible in windows disk management.
However any hard drive or drives, added to the server, with windows compatible partitions, after W.H.S has been installed will be visible in explorer.
Data on these drives can be migrated to the “single folder name space” using shares created in the WHS console.
They can then be are added to the WHS “single folder namespace” using Windows Home server Console this will cause them to be formatted.
External USB drives can be used by WHS in the “single folder name space” as well.
WHS Shares can also be accessed over the network or on the server its self, these shares can also be secured using user accounts created in the WHS console or not depending on need.
Unlike a spanned volume on other versions of windows, if a drive fails on WHS you only lose the data on the failed drive, however any share created on WHS can be set to be duplicated (mirrored) to prevent data loss if one drive fails.
This approach means data can be mirrored on a per share basis rather than using a whole drive as in Raid 1.
All in all well worth checking out.
Also there are many other features I haven’t mentioned in detail here like a centralized backing up of network based pc’s and video streaming to devices like the xbox 360, and windows desktop search will index WHS shares, and more

Normally its a very tiresome process ie open control panel…administrative tools…computer managment..etc

Well forget that just type diskmgmt.msc into the the run box and your go straight there.
Or create a shortcut to diskmgmt.msc in windows…system32

phew !!!

I tired installing this the other day.

I think its still needs some work it failed to install properly.

Also the install insists on wiping ALL disks attached to the computer.

This is very silly since most people using home server will have data they want to mirgrate into home server.