Thanks for the excellent tutorial! I successfully cloned a 2TB System/Data disk to a replacement 500GB disk. The data partition on the original disk was first downsized by using Drive Balancer until it would fit on the 500GB with room to spare. The disk was then cloned in a Windows 7 x64 system using the free home edition of EaseUS Partition Master. It provides a graphical interface for easily resizing the partitions and then cloned the disk without an issue. Carefully following the tutorial with regard to Disk ID, partition size changes, and registry settings made everything work.

The only issue that I encountered was a very minor one. I use the Disk Management for WHS add-in in my home-built server. After completing the steps in the tutorial, the Y-scale on the Volume Usage line graph was not accurately depicting the new disk size. I did a registy search for the Disk ID value and found a folder in HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows Home Server\Storage Manager\Volume\ that had to have its 'Size' value changed to reflect the new size of the replacement disk.

Same here with my HP Data Vault X300, thanks for the tip on the additional size change in the registry. I went from a failing 1 GB system/data disk to a replacement 160 GB disk with the same tools you used (Drive Balancer to move data off to the pool, EaseUS to shrink the system drive's data partition and copy the system disk to the replacement drive). While cloning the system drive, I was a little annoyed that EaseUS tries to change the size of your partitions on the destination disk. I took great care to use the size slider to make sure the destination system partition (C:) was exactly the same size as the source one. I may have been overly paranoid but I wanted to avoid additional registry changes and possible boot issues. The data pool (D:) partition doesn't have to be copied as carefully because it's getting resized anyway and it isn't the boot partition.

Drive Balancer was a big hassle for me, perhaps because I have duplication enabled for nearly all my shares. I actually had to use this manual method instead:

http://forum.wegotserved.com/index.php/ ... of-a-disk/

I ran that script, used the Services control panel to manually restart the Drive Extender service, and then had to wait about 5-10 minutes before disk activity began and WHS started moving data from my system drive's data partition to my other pool drives.

When I first restarted my server with the replacement system drive installed, I also couldn't connect to the WHS Console using the Connector (I just got an error message or a blank blue screen). Instead, I had to open a regular Remote Desktop Connection to the WHS server using the standard Windows client (username is Administrator, password is WHS server password) to reach the desktop. After doing the registry changes in the tutorial (viewtopic.php?f=3&t=6826) and rebooting I could log in from the WHS Connector once more.

For me, it makes sense to have a small system drive with no pool data on it. That's because it's such a gigantic hassle to replace the system drive and it's the only part of WHS that can't be made redundant (unless you have RAID, which I don't in my prebuilt HP rig). With a 160 GB system drive, I have no pool data at risk during a system drive failure and I can easily clone the drive to a cheap replacement if needed.

Storage pool data stored on the system drive is redundant as long as you have duplication enabled. It is no different than any other drive in the server in that regard.

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Alex Kuretz
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