Nope in fact unless you wipe the factory OS drive before you recover the os to the new drive it will most likely trip the copy protection and create all kinds of trouble for you.

Please understand the difference between recovery and factory restore. If you choose to do the factory restore all other drives will be wiped in the MediaSmart Server. You will loose everything in the MediaSmart. If you do the recovery then all drives must be in the MediaSmart at the time of the recovery and it is a one time only event.

wow, now I'm confused. So If I keep the existing OS drive in slot 3, will I be able to remove the old 500GB once the OS has been installed on the new 1TB drive in slot 1?

My experience is, if you turn the MediaSmart Server off.
Pull the third from the bottom empty carrier out, and replace it with the bottom drive, load your new 1 TB drive into the empty carrier and place it in the bottom slot, power up your MediaSmart and put it into recovery mode, and then attempt to run the recovery program you will trip the copy protection and the 1 TB drive will not boot. You will experience a blinking blue health indicator, and almost nothing you do will allow that drive to boot from that point.

{shrug} I'm not a software engineer, I have no contacts within HP. These are simply my observations based on my experiments, (over the last weekend) your experience maybe very different than mine. If this happens that 1 TB drive will format and become a pool drive without a problem, it just will not accept being formatted as a sys drive. This (the idea of copy protection) may explain why two people can have very different experiences with the same drive, why it will work for one and not another. Why so many drives are reported as being bad, (IMHO) when installed in the MediaSmart Server. At best this is a theory of mine, one I can't prove. But it seems to fit the facts as I know and understand them.

If your data is important to you I would suggest backing it up, off of the EX before you do your upgrade.

You can always add the 500 GB drive to the pool, by repartitioning it and reformatting it at any time. But you'll wipe anything on the drive doing this.

This is a brand new EX, which has never been used. So I'm not losing anything. I want to add the 1TB right away as the OS drive and rebuilt it using the factory restore but I want to remove the 500GB from the EX because I won't need it.

Then I suggest copying the Server Recovery Disc to your PC, it makes things go much faster pull the bottom disk and remove it, add your ! TB disk, navigate to where you copied the CD and find WHSRecovery.exe and run it. It will walk you through the steps you need to do. | Next | Check I accept.. | Next | turn on the EX470 and press the rest button with a paper clip when the health light flashes red/blue | next (when it is found) and then do NOT accept the default choose to do a Factory restore, the bottom option.

Interesting. I'll try that! so the bottom disk is slot 1 (OS drive) ?

I would just need to remove the factory drive, replace it with the 1TB drive and then run the Server Recovery Disc from my PC? sweet

On my EX475 the bottom disk is disk 0, the OS disk and system sees this as both drive C and drive D it is the only pool drive with a partition. Once you have it loaded you might want to get Windows Home Server Disk Management Add-In from here. It will give you a good visual id of what is happening with your server. You might also want to get ClientInfoAddIn2-0-0-0.msi from here.

If you are doing this on a Gbit LAN the whole thing should be less than an hour if you load the disk to your PC. Even if you run from a DVD drive it will not be more than an hour. If the health light flashes blue for more than 5 minutes at any point I believe something has gone wrong. Also for my eyes don't expect that health light to flash purple. Sometimes it will flash red then blue, other times it will light as solid red and just the blue will flash.

Raven,

What you are trying to accomplish is exactly what I did upon receipt of my MSS. I documented it in this thread and it was a "piece of cake".

As I have stated before FORGET the printed instructions. Just follow the onscreen prompts and if you get a "next", "accept" or "continue" button click it.

I also agree about the lights. If I remember correctly there was an instance where the light scheme did NOT match what the printed instructions said but I don't recall exactly where.

FYI, I DID at a LATER date re-add the original 500GB SYS drive to the "pool" WITHOUT doing anything to it. It reformatted and was added to the available space.

Good Luck!

Thanks. I have my RAM, HD and CPU upgrades ready. Just waiting for the unit to arrive any day now.

Cheers

Just for the record there is a lot of discussion in other threds (here and elsewhere) that you might be best off with the 500 GB drive in the bottom slot (as the system drive) and put the larger drives in the upper slots. The MSS/WHS attempts to off-load as much as possible to the other drives anyway and what is actually left free i\on the system (500) drive is probably sufficient for anything one would normally do. It is a bot of a waste of space to put a larger drive in the bottom.

Remember, the generic WHS guidelines presume that the mix of deives can include MUCH c\smaller ones than we got from HP.

I have an EX475 (2x500) and do plan, eventually, to add. I fully intend to leave my 500s in place and add a pair of 1TB drives above. If/when I want a third 1TB drive I'll remove the second 500.

I would definitely do that before replacing the bottom 500 with anything larger and moving the 500 up in the stack.

(BUT, as I said, there is a lot of debate on this!)

_________________
....JBick

EX475, 2 GB, LE-1640
PC1: Vista-->W7 Ultimate/32, (D-Drive RAID-5 Array)
PC2: Lenovo Laptop, Win XP Home SP3
2xLinksys WRT54G v1.1 and 2xNetGear GS105 Gbit switch

If all of my data is duplicated and I remove the system drive to perform a server recovery to a larger capacity drive, my understanding is that the tombstones will be re-created and the server will know where all my data is.

Other than the default shares, are the other shares and user folders recovered as well? What will I need to recover myself, if anything?

_________________
Richard

My gadget blog: http://www.gadgetinsane.com

You'll need to completely re-configure your system, meaning you'll need to make a new admin password, rename server, create users, configure remote access, etc. All data stored will remain intact.

So, if I upgrade the system drive, will the data on the other drives be ok?

Anyone?

Right above your post I said:



So the answer to your question is yes, as long as you do a Server Recovery and not a Factory Reset your data should be fine.