Hi,

Before I go ahead and attempt to do a full system drive upgrade, I have some quick pre-upgrade questions:

1) The current system drive is 500GB. As long as the new HD is 500GB or more I am ok?

2) Do I need to purchase a specific brand/model? are the Seagate Barracuda or the WD Black drives suitable?

3) To backup my current WHS system drive, can I use Acronis True Image Home 2011? is it AF-Aware?

4) Should/could I choose the option "sector-by-sector" disk clone copy of my current WHS drive? would this make it easier in anyway for an HD swap?

5) It is possible to have a 6 months old acronis backup of my WHS system drive when doing an HD swap? I ask this question because you never know when the system drive will fail and the backup may be a weeks or a few months old...so how would it affect the WHS system/data drives? or is this not recommended and I should do a swap right away after doing a clone backup?

My WHS was purchased in 2007 and hard drives tend to fail after a few years. I have alot of special software and automation systems running on my WHS system drive and a HP recovery disc is really not an option for me. Before the drive fails I will need to be ready.

Thanks
Raven

_________________
EX470 + Athlon LE-1620 CPU & 2GB Kingston RAM Upgrades

Hello,

1. Yes. WHS has a 2TB limit however (ie: don't try using a 3TB drive).
2. Any brand/model will do, but if it was me, I'd opt for the Seagate 2TB green drive (or whatever they call it).
3. I believe that version of Acronis is AF aware, but you may need to create & use the boot-cd version thereof to perform the operation as the in-windows portion of the software may refuse to work with your WHS system disk since it will consider it a server system disk (and you're using the 'home' version of the software).
4. No, I'd avoid the sector-by-sector clone in case it might break something in the transition from non-AF to AF drive.
5. No. That won't work. The tombstones/pointers to all your files reside on the D: partition and would be drastically out of sync with the rest of your drives. WHS wouldn't know where to find what data anymore.
   
   If you try to use an aged backup image you'd soon find yourself performing a complete system restore. Perform the swap right away.
   
   Backup your special/automation software individually, separately + manually.

Cheers

Hi ymboc,

Thanks for your quick reply and information. for point #3, I am a bit lost when you say I would need to use the boot-cd version of Acronis to perform the AF. is this explained in your procedure?

I just learned that the drives I have on order (WD Black drives) are not AF aware so let me know what I need to do after cloning the WHS system drive.

Thanks again

_________________
EX470 + Athlon LE-1620 CPU & 2GB Kingston RAM Upgrades

Those comments are from my experience with using various acronis products.

I deliberately avoided providing software-specific how-to-image/clone instructions primarily because everyone uses a different drive-imaging product but also to avoid any 'you said to use X, will this also work with Y?' questions.

Anyway all that aside... the 'home' version of acronis true image is known to (artificially) refuse to perform any operations on what it deems are 'server' system drives -- they have another, more expensive product they want to sell you to do that.

WHS is based off of Small Business Server 2003. The within-windows portion of Acronis TI Home will recognize a WHS system disk as a SBS 2003 system disk and refuse to perform any operations on it. Acronis TI Home will however let you make a (linux-based) boot-cd of its product with the included 'bootable rescue media builder'. The resulting bootable CD is not as picky about performing operations on 'server' system drives as its within-windows counterpart.

Careful with the use of terminology/acronyms... AF stands for Advanced Format. AF-aware imaging software will automatically properly align volumes and filesystems to an AF drive's physical boundaries. Non-AF-aware imaging software will not and you'd have to perform and additional alignment step with alignment-correcting software (provided by the hard drive manufacturer).... The exception to this is of course seagate's AF drives which will transparently workaround alignment issues with special harddrive firmware.

Thanks for the explanations. As for AF, do I need to do anything at all since I will be using a non-AF drive as replacement? if so, why and how would I go about to do this? is this something I do on the cloned drive once I have completed the acronis clone backup prior to re-inserting the new drive in WHS?

Sorry for the newbie questions

Thanks
Raven

_________________
EX470 + Athlon LE-1620 CPU & 2GB Kingston RAM Upgrades

AF-aware imaging/cloning software should get the alignment right no matter what type of drive you use.

AF-unaware imaging/cloning software should get the alignment right on non-AF drives.

AF-unaware imaging/cloning software will get the alignment wrong on AF drives. An additional re-alignment step would be required after performing the imaging/cloning operation with AF-unaware software.

You mentioned you will be using Acronis True Image Home 2011... it is AF aware. You shouldn't have any alignment issues no matter what drive you end up migrating to.

Great thanks for the info. I will do what the others have done using TI which is to install both the original WHS system drive and the new drive in a workstation and do a direct clone copy option. Seems to have worked for everyone so far

Thanks again
Raven

_________________
EX470 + Athlon LE-1620 CPU & 2GB Kingston RAM Upgrades

The impossible is now possible. I'm now running a new 500GB WD Black series WHS System drive and everything is perfect. Green light.
I can now sleep better knowing its a new drive, as my previous system drive could have failed at any moment (4.5 years old).

ymboc, you rock

_________________
EX470 + Athlon LE-1620 CPU & 2GB Kingston RAM Upgrades

Thanks ymboc,
I successfully have my EX490 restored. Goal was to resize the system partition but I ended up with a partly working WHS. Couldn't get into the console because the backup services failed to start. With RDP I managed to follow your post and now everything is back alive.
However, step 27 was very difficult. I had to rename the binary mentioned in step 27.6. At first I tried it with the mounting device D and after a reboot, the backup services was running. And I was able to start the WHS console. A critical error was stated about de C drive, so I renamed the binary values for mounting device C, rebooted and the critical error was gone.
To other forum readers, I would strongly suggest that you backup (if possible multiple times) your data if you're planning to resize the system partition of a already running WHS.

--------------------------
MSS EX490
2 GB RAM
1 TB Storage

Thanks to ymboc for putting the procedure together and to mdmyers for his steps using Clonezilla!

EX485 with a 750GB Seagate to a 1TB Samsung HD103SJ

The procedure worked out just as documented. I would highly recommend that you install the SMART add-in and as soon as you see issues with the boot drive, replace it. I saw warnings about a month ago and figured I had some time. Nope. Then bad sectors started to show up. I read through this whole topic and figured I would use Clonezilla Live. It works great once I learned more about it. So, I'll give an outline of what I did, so hopefully, it will be even easier for others.

I followed mdmyers steps. but that assumes that your drive doesn't have any bad sectors. Mine ended up with bad sectors on the DATA partition, which had some data on it, but I think it was put there by the system. I had the server filled with drives from day 1.

So, I took the drive and attached it via a USB dock to my XP machine and ran checkdsk /f /r to hopefully salvage the data. Then I ran Clonezilla to the 1TB drive using the following steps:

* Boot from clonezilla-live-1.2.11-23.iso (image downloaded yesterday)
1. Choose language - default (en_US.UTF-8)
2. Don't touch keymap
3. Start Clonezilla
4. device-device
5. Expert
6. disk_to_local_disk
7. select source disk (e.g. sda)
8. select target disk (e.g. sdb)
9. Here is the screen with available options:
-g auto
-e1 auto
-e2
-j2
-r
-nogui
-m
-rescue <---- select this option
-fsck-src-part
-o
-b
-v
(Try to scroll up/down if you don't see these all)
10. Some settings for target partition table
11. Confirmation screen. You can see the generated command line. For rescue - it contains "-rescue" option.

If you have bad sectors, you'll see errors stating that there is lost data. The program should complete. If your disk has too many errors, they recommend using ddrescue or gddrescue that is on the Clonezilla disk. I never used them, so I'm not sure how they work.

I went through the rest of ymboc's guide and found that I only had to change the name of the hard drive and extend the drive space. All the other information was already there. This is the same thing that mdmyers had found. Now, everything is running well and seems to be faster than it was before. I hope this can help someone else out.

I used Clonezilla,
the only thing i had to "change" was expending the volume
Thanks to all you Guys - you're Hero's!!

First, thank you for all the effort that went into this article. It clearly helped a bunch of people.

Second, I've got an issue. I had a Seagate 1 TB drive as my system drive (I upgraded when I first bought the system back when the MSS first came out). Starting about two weeks ago I got messages about the system drive failing. I purchased a Seagate 2 TB AF drive. I didn't realize it was an AF drive or that it mattered (Comp1962 indicated it was AF drives don't work on page 4). Although I'm not sure it matters based on reading this entire thread.

What I Did:
I used Clonezilla to clone the drive. Note, that as dreamland95 had issues, so did I. I however, haven't tried running checkdsk or with the rescue option yet. That may be my next step.

I followed the rest of the article exactly. I even printed it so I could check off things as I went.

I then booted into WHS with the new 2TB drive. I remoted in and made the changes per the article. However, I believe I only had to change the manufacturer name.

I rebooted the server and it didn't boot. I believe the one light was just flashing blue and no drive lights were on. After half an hour I still couldn't remote in. To make sure I didn't have a further hardware failure I put the original system drive back in and it booted.

My next step will be to connect the 2TB drive back to my other machine and replace the config directory I backed up and try again.

My question to the community is if the second try tonight doesn't work. If it doesn't should I redo the clone with the rescue option? Should I purchase a new non-AF drive and redo the clone?

Thank you,
Ryan

It took me multiple attempts as I had to get by the bad sector issue. I finally caught on that Clonezilla was actually failing on the bad sectors and I had to run it with the -rescue option. I would try that first and see how it works.

Seagate's AF drives have a 'SmartAlign' feature that takes care of partition & filesystem alignment for you -- no further action required.

That aside, Have you tried Seagate's DiscWizard? It's basically a rebadged version of acronis that should be AF-aware anyway -- I'm not sure but it may have some advanced options when dealing with bad sectors.

I tried again last night. I ran the following command

/opt/drbl/sbin/ocs-onthefly -g auto -e1 auto -e2 -j2 -r -nogui -m -rescue -fsck-src-part -o -v -f sdb -t sdc

Note: I didn't select -b as you did because the option wasn't there. There was a -batch option, but it was listed as "DANGEROUS".

When modifying the registry I only had to change the manufacturer name for the drive. The offsets already matched the WMIC output. The binary data also matched for the c and d drives.

When I rebooted the same thing happened. The right of the three lights on the front just blinked blue and never finished booting after half an hour.

Both times I tried this procedure I had the 2 data drives out while modifying the registry and put them back in after shutdown, before booting back up.

Suggestions?

Thanks for the quick replies yesterday.