Hello Everyone,

I've got an ex485 on order. I hope it will arrive shortly. I have played with WHS ever so briefly on a trial bases, so I'm not as familiar with it as the other MS OSs.

I have a quick question that I can't seem to search for without a ton of hits unrelated to my specific question.

I would like to create a disk image of the system drive using something like Acronis prior to power-up. I do this for all the PCs I purchase so that I can get it exactly back to how it was delivered if need be.

I am not sure if WHS uses FAT32, NTFS, or something else. So would anyone be able to tell me if it is possible to catch an image of the system drive using Acronis?

It is also my hope that HP's WHS setup is clean and without a bunch of software trial stuff that bugs you to buy. Can anyone give me a heads up on this. I've been known to take a brand new Dell PC and re-install the OS just to get rid of the extra crude that I am not going to buy.

Thanks,

Klips

The server comes with a recovery dvd, giving you the choice of a factory restore, or a server recovery (the first being completely destructive and taking it to back to how it was delivered). On a single drive system, you can use image software, but as you add more disks it won't work so you're best just sticking with the recovery disk.

There are some additional pieces of software on the server, but some are choices and they are not pre-installed (McAfee for example), other such as the Photoviewer, Media Collector and Video Converter are pre-installed but are generally useful (although the features can be switched off if you dont want to use them).

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Yes, I am a newbie to WHS. I'm sure playing with one soon, I'll discover the answers rather quickly.

But help me understand something. Assuming that the system drive failed. Is the data on the 'other' drives would still be good (readable)? Can you take any of the data drives out and read them from a PC? I should be able to recover the system drive without losing data, correct?

I have a BlacX dock http://www.thermaltakeusa.com/Product.aspx?C=1346&ID=1731 that I use to access data from other PC systems. RAID systems have bitten me hard in the past as you can only read data through the MB's RAID controller and the OS is corrupted. I was hoping the WHS would be a safer alternative. Was I wrong on this fact?

Klips

Assuming you have duplication turned on then, it works similar to raid but maintains 2 copies of your files (on separate disks) and the data is stored away from the system drive as a preference. It will only start using the system drive if others are full. This also means you can just take the disk out of your server and put it into another machine should you need to and just copy data straight off the drive.

So, the other mode of the Server Recovery Disc will perform a "Server Recovery", this will lay down a new OS install but keep your data intact (again, preferable to have multi drives).

It would probably be useful to you to have a look at the Technical Briefs for WHS, specifically the Drive Extender one as it may answer many of your questions around how the Drive Extender technology works.

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