I am going to replace all my drives for 2TB's. I have replicated my movies so that once I hot swap the drives my movies won't be lost. I just have some questions that I am un sure on this procedure.

1) how do I swap the old drive out and put the new ones in. Do I need to do this when the server is off? Or when it's online and I have to select some option?

2) how do I replace the default os drive 0 for a 2TB HDD? Please don't tell me I need to redo the os installation.

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EX490
CPU E6550
8TB HDD's
2GB RAM

You begin by reading the manual and I have attached the relevant pages. To replace the system drive, you need to do a server restore.

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Or clone the system drive: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=6826

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Alex Kuretz
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Do bear in mind that Cliff is referring to "Server Recovery" and not Factory Reset. If you do the latter, you can safely kiss all of your data good-bye.

Outside of that, the manual will explain how to remove a drive from the pool, and how to add a new one. In order to safely remove a drive from the pool, there has to be enough free space remaining on the remaining drives to accommodate what is coming off of the removed one. If it's a full 1 TB drive coming out, and you have 750 GB free in the pool, you don't have enough free space. In that case, you have to add a new drive to the pool first--this can be done by adding a USB or eSATA drive, even if only as a temporary measure. You can always remove that once you've got all your new drives added.

If you replace the system drive, do also bear in mind that it has data on it, and it's not so easy to remove from the pool. You may want to try a system drive clone instead, which is well documented on this site.

And unless you have the 2 TB drives on hand, this is a really bad time to consider buying a new hard drive since prices are so high. I felt the sting last week when I bought a drive to replace a failing one in a desktop. Fortunately it was on sale and about the best price I could find anywhere.

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Matt Sawyer
Owner, Dojo North Software, LLC

HP EX490, 4GB, E5300, 15TB - Server 2012 - Sharing and Streaming
HP EX487, 4GB, E5300, 13TB - Server 2012 Essentials - Backups

msawyer91,
Can you explain how to replace the system drive in more detail? I have an EX490 that came with the original 1TB drive. About a year later I added a 2TB Samsung drive to storage pool and turned on folder duplication on most data folders. I have recently purchased a 2TB Seagate drive (talk about high prices right now!) and want to replace the original 1TB drive since the SMART monitor showed some errors. I know that there is data on the system drive but wasn't sure if the Server Recovery method will put back the data on the system drive. I had recently done a Server Recovery (had the flashing blue health light with no drive lights lit up) and was able to get everything back up and running with the original 1TB system drive.

Now that I have a 2TB drive to replace the system drive, I want to make sure I am doing it correctly and won't be losing any data.

thanks,
Robokam

You'll want to check out this article: viewtopic.php?t=6826

That talks about how to successfully clone and upgrade the system drive. While it is theoretically possible to replace the drive and perform a server recovery, you will lose backups that reside in that data partition. Drive Extender will restore any duplicated files in the shares, but some backups will be lost. It sounds based on your post you are well aware of that fact and wish to avoid data loss. Appropriately so, the cloning would be your best bet.

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Matt Sawyer
Owner, Dojo North Software, LLC

HP EX490, 4GB, E5300, 15TB - Server 2012 - Sharing and Streaming
HP EX487, 4GB, E5300, 13TB - Server 2012 Essentials - Backups

Ok here is my layout. I have 4 HDD's on my server in this order
2TB
1TB
1TB
1TB (system drive)

I enabled duplication on my movie files and only have 250GB left on the pool. I have 3 2TB drives ready to replace the 1TB's. How can I add them wiithout losing my movies? I know the option for the system drive is to clone it.

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EX490
CPU E6550
8TB HDD's
2GB RAM

Okay, If you have duplication on you should be set to go. With multiple drives.
The procedure would be to login to the whs console.
Select a non system drive and opt for removal.
Bear in mind it could take hours.
After windows has removed the drive,
Then swap out the drive.
Add it back to the pool.
again that will take a while to format the drive and move data to it.
This part I am not so sure on since you are replacing all of them.
I would wait a day so the balancing is complete before moving on the the next drive.

I would not do the OS drive till you have replaced the pool drives so you have ample space to get data off of the system drive.

BTW, When I say hours or a while it could be many hours.
Like say 3-5 hours minimum.

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I heard clonezilla can back up the diskid which is the most important thing when upgrading the system drive. Was this verified if this works? If not I guess the only option is to do the clone drive guide provided here.

Also what's the order of upgrading the HDD's? Should I do all the data drives first then clone the OS or vice versa or really doesn't matter?

Thanks guys

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EX490
CPU E6550
8TB HDD's
2GB RAM

You could use BDBB and enable the duplication of the PC backup database to be safe. Once you add a 2nd drive the the pool, WHS usually moves the PC backup folder to that drive, so if your system drive fails, you have a good chance of still having it.

Also if ALL shares have been duplicated then you should be able to pull the system drive and replace it with a new drive and do a Server Recovery. It will add the existing shares and rebuild the duplication of the files that were on the D partition on the system drive since ALL shares were duplicated and now the data that was on the original D partition is missing, it will be re duplicated back. You will have to recreate the User accounts, but the data should still be there. You will have a vanilla OS install so you have to reinstall all the addins and any software.

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HP MediaSmart EX495 E8600 3.2Ghz CPU, 4GB ram, 8TB storage including 3TB drives in pool. WHS with Active Directory, WDS, Media Center Master, Logitech server. Office 2010 server with client add-ins.
Microsoft MVP - Windows Home Server.