Hi,

Thanks for the great guide, but I'm totally stuck on step 27.5 and 27.6. When I navigate to the \DosDevices\C: key, I highlight the code and select copy. But when I return to the system name key to paste, paste is always grayed out. It's like it wont allow me to paste the binary code in the dosdevices key into the text field of the system name. Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

nevermind, I finally figured out to paste them into the matching code entries on 'that' same page (kinda like in the picture), although arrows connecting the pairs of balloons would have made it more painfully obvious for me at least, lol!

Thanks again,

Note: I had tried to remove my old WD 200gb system drive and replace it with a spare 150gb velociraptor I had by using server reinstall. That failed horribly after 'restoring data' for about 12 hours.

Using this technique I was able to make it work. But it was a colossal pain shrinking down the data partition using the free tools. Acronis wouldn't do the c: partition because it sees that it's a server, so I used macrium for that, but macrium wouldn't shrink the data partition so I did that separately using Acronis again.

Sparkling instructions; huzzah! Replaced by 475's stock drive with a Hitachi 2TB drive.

The original drive was a Seagate, so I was able to download and use Seagate's DiskWizard to clone the disk at no cost. I did have to change the uniqueid.

I had two 1TB disks that I removed from the WHS when I did the registry edits, and then put back in for the reboot.

Only quirk is if I do a remote desktop connection to my WHS and look at the DATA drive properties, I see that it has values of:
Used space: )('(+/.-,-0, bytes 422748160
Free space: 2,768,771,346,432 bytes 2.51 TB
Capacity: 1,978,920,112,128 bytes 1.79 TB
(see the attached image)



"My Computer" shows the same incorrect Free and Total sizes (2.51 TB and 1.79 TB). N.B., the 1.79 TB is about the space of the DATA partition contribution from my replacement disk (2TB - 20GB = 1.80 TB).

If I connect to the Windows HomeServer Console and look at the "Server Storage" tab then all the values are reasonable; Total Size is 3.64 TB and Free Space is 2.52 TB.

Did I screw up a step here or are others seeing the same thing?

I have one simple question.

If I have just a system drive c: and d: and no other drives installed in the server. If the system is on the way and I have identical spare drive can the system drive just be cloned and nothing else?

thanks

ChuckN: My 'D' Properties has the same glitch... Hasn't affected functionality . Can someone confirm this glitch is not present before following the instructions?

dvda: I'm not sure what you're asking but the cloning operation is performed on the complete system drive (including the 'D' partition). Also, don't try to use the cloning operation to backup your server -- it should be used in an upgrade context only.

Yes, my non-cloned system shows this as well.

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Yup, this has been an issue ever since the first HP install I've had. It's a known MS bug for Drive Extender (they never intended for users to RDP directly anyways).


Beyond confirmation, I registered just to say THANK YOU to ymboc for putting this all together! You rock. If it helps, I would also like to add my own findings:

1. I first tried this on a WD EARS drive (WD10EARS). 4 attempts with different configurations (non-jumpered, jumpered, cloned using clonezilla, cloned using acronis) yielded successful boots, but TERRIBLE stuttering slow performance across the board. SMB performance was terrible, RDP was bad, the admin console was virtually unusable. I finally gave up and imaged to an older WD EADS drive and everything worked smoothly on the first try. Not sure if this just affected me and the particular cloning methods I tried or if it's an issue specific to Advanced Format drives?

From the looks of this post, it seems other users were successful using other 4K drives...

2. This is just a good practice for all around imaging, but it helps a lot to move non-system data off the drive to be imaged. Especially if you're cloning an entire disk.

People can save a lot of time with preparation if they move data off the system disk to the rest of the storage pool first (a utility called "Drive Balancer" does this perfectly) in advance. This way, when you're imaging your drive, intelligent cloning utilities like clonezilla will know the data is empty and won't waste time copying empty space. In other words, cloning a system disk with only 20GB (C partition) may only take 2-3 minutes compared to a complete cloning job which may take 2-3 hours copying hundreds of GB of data as well (Data partition).

Edit:
As a newly registered user, i can't put in embedded links. Here's the URL to the drive balancer utility:
http://forum.wegotserved.com/index.php/ ... available/

silencery: Did you try the (free) WD-Edition of Acronis? It now supports advanced format drives! There have however been reports that some versions of Acronis refuse to work with a WHS system volume - not sure if those reports applied to the WD edition.

Failing that, the approach would be to follow the procedure up to the point where you've completed the cloning operation, and then use one of WD's free alignment tools before continuing with the procedure.

FYI: The jumper approach does not work for the system drive because it has two partitions. The jumper approach is valid only for single-volume drives - which means it works perfectly for pool drives.

If you're looking at upgrading again later, consider the Seagate AF drives - they have a 'SmartAlign' feature that if it works as advertised will make alignment issues a thing of the past. Can't say if it works though - all my AF drives are WD EARS and my system drive is an EADS.

Followup: I've updated the procedure to include (some of) the above information and added an optional step after the clone operation to perform a (re)alignment if using AF-unaware disk imaging software.

ymboc:

You know what, you're absolutely right. I completely forgot about the single partition restriction for the jumper method. It all makes complete sense why it didn't work now; I didn't even think to try non-jumper alignment methods.

Thanks for the reminder!

First off, thank you for the hard work. Unfortunately, I have run into a problem with step 27.5.
I am unable to change the name of the of the entry as the box is grayed out.

any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you

Does anybody happen to know if these instructions would work using the tranquil safe server module?
Is it possible to assign the old diskid to the SSM?
Thanks

Hey guys,

I've tried this method and failed. I dont know what I've done wrong, it all seems to be correct, but doesnt work.

As apposed to most of the replies here, I'm actually working with a new install. The reason for the new install is 3x OCZ Vertex SSDs, in striped RAID.

Long story short, the install direct to the array doesnt work. The clone does.

At the end of the guide I end up with the SSD array booting into WHS and working but the drive is listed as not in the pool, and in the pool... at the same time.
I used Acronis which changed the Drive IDs for me... apparently.

I'm out of ideas, please help.

Can someone write a program to reset the DeviceIDs, VolumeIDs etc? It would make this process so easy!

Fantastic post! I have a problem though. On step 27.6 my D: volume appears twice in the registry. which one do i modify?


Nevermind. after looking at it about 400 times i realized that the 8th character is actually different. I think i might need glasses..

Chalk me up as another success. Thanks very much ymboc!!

Successfully replaced a 750GB Samsung SpinPoint HD753LJ with a 2TB Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000 and everything went smoothly.

One note, I used EASEUS's Disk Copy Free 2.3 to clone the drive. I can verify that it indeed cloned the unique DiskID as well, so I didn't have to complete step 14 because in step 13 I realized it was already done. Even though it's a bit of a hassle to burn a CD and boot to it to do the disk cloning, Disk Copy worked great for me. Just thought I would pass that on for anyone who is trying this and isn't sure which disk cloning software to use.

Cheers!

I am in the middle of doing this cloning and have taken your advice to use EASUS's Disk Copy Free V2.3.

So to reiterate, you can skip steps 3-7 and steps 11-14 as the EASUS Disk Copy Free disk to disk copy clones the unique DiskID as well as all the data.

I used diskpart to determine the unique DiskIDs of both disks before I started the disk to disk copy and I will check them after to verify.

I am doing the disk to disk copy using SATA to SATA and it will end up taking almost 3 hours for a 500 GB drive, I can't imagine how much longer it would take doing a USB to USB and/or larger source drive. It would have been wise to get this started last night and it would have been complete for me in the morning.

Update: the disk to disk copy took over three hours and ended up producing 358 read errors so I wasn't confident of using that copied disk and simply rebuilt the server, aka server recovery, then used a WHSBDBB backup to restore my client system backups.

This experience has strongly directed me to using WHS 2011, where there is a stable and recent OS base with excellent system tools available.