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How to successfully clone and upgrade a WHS system drive.
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Author:  wrightrandy [ Sat May 31, 2014 3:08 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: How to successfully clone and upgrade a WHS system drive

The data partition was definitely cloned and is there. The strange thing is that everything seems to be mounted right. I can can go into explorer and see all the shares. If the D: drive wasn't mounted, I wouldn't be able to see them. One thing I noticed is that there was no mention of the volume ID for the data partition being duplicated. I did that as well, but no difference. I decided to disconnect all the other drives and reboot. Here is the disk manager view of the new disk. You can see the data partition is there and the partition is 44% full. That makes sense because the old 500G drive was 90% full. I'm stumped.

Attachments:
Disk.jpg
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Author:  reneg [ Wed Jun 25, 2014 7:44 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: How to successfully clone and upgrade a WHS system drive

Just wanted to say thanks. The process worked for me. Cloned a failing 1GB to a brand new 1GB drive using Clonezilla and the steps here. I had some strange trouble with the WHS Event log on the cloned drive but after a reboot, things were back to normal.

Author:  Fred01 [ Sat Sep 13, 2014 8:13 am ]
Post subject:  Re: How to successfully clone and upgrade a WHS system drive

Another successful system clone. Thanks.

Author:  yeller [ Tue Nov 11, 2014 9:20 am ]
Post subject:  Re: How to successfully clone and upgrade a WHS system drive

Backed up a 1.5 TB Seagate drive to a 2Tb WD drive. The Seagate had SMART errors all over the place.

I used Acronis True Image 2014 to backup/restore the main system drive. The only thing I had to do was update the drive name in the registry, otherwise everything else was already done. I wonder if Acronis was able to capture additional parameters not available when this guide was originally written.

Thanks OP.

Author:  GDogTech [ Mon Dec 01, 2014 2:43 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: How to successfully clone and upgrade a WHS system drive

I know this is an old thread, but it is still quite relevant to those of us hanging onto a WHS v1 server. I just wanted to post my experience at following this Guide and say thanks to the originator of it, ymboc. Very simply, it works - *if* you follow the instructions to the letter!

I had originally bought TWO WD Black 500GB HDD's at the same time for my WHS v1 system drive, keeping one as a backup. After nearly 3 years, I started getting errors on the first one, so I decided rather than take any chances, since I had the other identical drive, I would go ahead and replace it using this method before the drive became unreadable.

I used Acronis v8 bootable CD as ymboc did since I happened to have a copy of it (I tried the latest version of Macreum Reflect Free, but it failed - TWICE). I ran Acronis as a CLONE operation from the old drive straight to the new one. The cloning process took about 20 hours to complete. When it was done, I hooked the new drive back up to the Win7 box, ran diskpart and was surprised to find that it now had the exact same Unique ID as the old drive. So, given that, I thought I would just try to go ahead and use it as-is. No Go. It booted fine and I could see all my shares, but I was getting the "Backup Service not Running" message. Not good. So, I took it out, hooked it back up to the Win7 box and proceeded to do all the Registry mods in the guide. All changes were different from what was already there except for the Starting Offset for Disk 0 Partition 0, and the \DosDevices\C: Hex Code. Those two things did not need to be changed.

I was VERY careful at every step along the way, keeping text records and screen prints of every step, so I could possibly get back to where I was if something went wrong. I have to admit, I was quite comfortable with all the mod steps except the LAST one, #27. Those copies of the HEX data would not "Paste" into my Notepad or Wordpad. I couldn't see any way to save that information outside of the clipboard. This effectively made this last step IRREVERSABLE. Scary when you have 26TB of data.

Regardless, fingers crossed and a couple of prayers, I forged ahead, double and triple checking everything to make sure I didn't make any mistakes. I shut down the server as instructed, rebooted and I am VERY happy to report that the system booted back up just as I had left it before pulling the drive with no errors at all!! NICE!

KUDOS to you ymboc! This was a BIG time saver, a great service to the community, and I for one just wanted to say THANKS!
Gary

Author:  Daybreak [ Fri Jan 09, 2015 9:58 am ]
Post subject:  Re: How to successfully clone and upgrade a WHS system drive

Howdy,
What can I say... Thank you for the instructions.

Yes, The method described in post 1 from ymboc work as described.

Simply to wrap this all up, HP ex495 Windows Home Server v1 PP3, all updates has been running along fine. The system drive was starting to show some issues. Shut down system, made a image of complete drive (Acronis True Image) with the option to skip bad sectors, took the new 1tb (same size) and restored the image with restore disk signature. I still went through the whole process that is written, and all was correct, I did not need to do anything.

Yippee, old ex495 still lives :)

Thanks,
Mike

Author:  RedSun [ Sun Mar 01, 2015 9:58 am ]
Post subject:  Re: How to successfully clone and upgrade a WHS system drive

A lot of discussion here. I guess very nice work.

But I think we are missing something really important. The WHS DE is a vertual disk or disk pool, based on the physical disks. There is no such thing of (physical) cloning if the target physical HD system is different from the original one. This is clearly the case when you expand the file system.

The proper moving of file system should be done at the virtual disk (volume), not at the physical level. You use disk backup software (e.g. Acronis) to backup the data folders, not the DE pool. The starting partition can be backed up as partition.

This is the same way how folks move an old RAID system to a new RAID system. You copy data folders, not partition, or disks.

When you build the new WHS, restore the system partition first. Then restore the data folder backup to the new DE pool. I do not see the needs to mess with the physical layer (disk geometry, etc.).

Hope this makes sense.

Author:  AzJazz [ Tue Jun 16, 2015 3:00 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: How to successfully clone and upgrade a WHS system drive

Can a similar process to this be done to add a GPT 4TB pool drive to my server?

It seems like I could:

  1. Install the 4TB drive, and let the WHS add it to the pool normally (it would probably be formatted as a 2TB drive).
  2. Shut down the WHS, and remove the drive.
  3. Make an image of the drive
  4. Clone the image onto the drive with a new GPT partition set to 4TB.
  5. Reinsert the drive into the WHS, power it up, and then just follow Part 3.

I don't think I would need to fool around with the Disk ID in Part 1, since it is the same disk.
Part 2 shouldn't be necessary, since I will be cloning the image onto an already expanded drive.

Will this work?

AzJazz

Author:  Ruben Rocha [ Wed Jun 17, 2015 1:55 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: How to successfully clone and upgrade a WHS system drive

The issue is the mappoint assigned by whsv1 it will change once you reformat.
This topic is about cloning a existing system drive.
Meaning it is still limited to 2 TB.
There are however topics about fooling whsv1 to use greater than 2tb drives for drive pools.
And of course a backup drive can be greater that 2tb.

Author:  effendenby [ Fri Oct 23, 2015 4:32 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: How to successfully clone and upgrade a WHS system drive

First and foremost, a greatly appreciative "THANK YOU" to ymboc for the instructions on how to do this. After driving 2500 miles then staying up for 30 hours I was able to successfully clone my original 500GB HDD that came with my EX470(which was starting to fail) to a 2TB Green Caviar WDC WD20 EARS-00MVWB0 SCSI.
I did make a mistake somewhere along the line & had to start all over again but nailed on the second time even going so far as to tell the wife which lights would be blue & which ones would be pink when I was done.(heavy sweating during the reboot, let me tell you, as she watched).
Thank you to Alex for starting this site & helping a geriatric newbie.

Author:  jaydee [ Fri Oct 23, 2015 4:50 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: How to successfully clone and upgrade a WHS system drive

Just wanted to say, Thank You to ymboc! Was sweating a failing system drive and was not looking forward to re-visiting customization from scratch. Thanks again for the great instructions!

Author:  Mgompie [ Mon Nov 30, 2015 11:35 am ]
Post subject:  Re: How to successfully clone and upgrade a WHS system drive

Moved a 1 TB system-drive to a 2TB SSHD on a WHS-1 HP media smartserver and it worked! The only thing I had to do after the change was a database repair

:banana: :chicken: =P~ :sanjuan:

Thanks for the good description.

Author:  dstrahm [ Thu Mar 10, 2016 3:04 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: How to successfully clone and upgrade a WHS system drive

UPDATE 2016/03/13: Received no response to this post so was trolling other boards trying to find a solution to no avail. I was logged in via RDC and poking around to see if anything stuck out as a possible source of the inability to connect properly. Just happened to notice that the time was a bit off, about an hour, but when I went to correct the time I noticed that it was off by years, 2007 in this case. Once the time was corrected everything else started working perfect; Connector installed - everyone happy! Hopefully someone else having this problem will stumble across this post and find happiness!! :D


The cloning process went very well. I did not have a client that could handle two external drives at the same time so I used the WD version of Acronis to make a backup then restored to a new drive. The old drive, an original 500G, was starting to get hot and showing excessive seek times. The new drive is 1TB since 500GB's are hard to find. The clone/recover process did not have an option to resize proportionately so it came out with two partitions of 500GB each. I'm not concerned about that, there is still plenty of data storage for my uses.

Unfortunately I am now having a problem getting the WHS to reconnect to the Connector on the clients here as well as folder access across the network. The icon was always gray. Here are the troubleshooting steps I went through and some of the other symptoms it is showing:

1. Exited and restarted Connector - no change
2. Started the Console and everything there worked as usual. Could use the add-ins, see all the drives, see the shares, etc.
3. Uninstalled the Connector and reinstalled from the Server. This is where things started getting weird. The install would not complete because the step where you enter the Server password failed saying the password is not correct. The password works fine when I use the RDC. I can browse all of the folders on the server and run apps, no issues.
4. The Server shows up in the list of network devices on the client, but when opened it only shows the Users folder. At first I could only open the subfolder associated with the client I am using, but now even that does not work, it keeps asking for password and will not accept a valid password. Also, when I did have access at first only the folders that had been set up for offline access were accessible, the others had a gray X on the folder/file icon.

Any insight on what is happening and how to fix it is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Doug

Author:  metzen [ Tue Mar 15, 2016 7:50 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: How to successfully clone and upgrade a WHS system drive

Did you put a password hint and if so does that show up after typing in the password? If the hint is working then I would suggest re downloading the connector software from the server. And reinstalling but be sure to un-install and restart the computer.

Author:  Ewing [ Sat Apr 02, 2016 3:01 am ]
Post subject:  Re: How to successfully clone and upgrade a WHS system drive

does this procedure work for WHS2011?

if not can you help me find the correct one for 2011

i am trying to go to a larger HD

thanks

George

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