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| How to successfully clone and upgrade a WHS system drive. http://www.mediasmartserver.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=6826 |
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| Author: | Comp1962 [ Tue Nov 09, 2010 4:26 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: How to successfully clone and upgrade a WHS system drive |
Your very welcome! I have never tested the Guide on how to clone a system drive but others have used it and indicate it works and so its an option for you and probably a quicker task then doing a server recovery. I guess this all boils down to where your comfort level is. The only thing I would encourage you to do is read all posts from those who have done the System Drive Cloning. As for reusing your original System Drive in your server as a storage pool drive you will need to delete the partitions and then format the drive before adding it to your storage pool. Failure to do this will cause issues with your server down the road at which point you would then need to perform a server recovery. There is a reason for doing this and I do not recall that exact reason but I do know that using a drive previously used as a system drive has to be treated this way or it will cause issues for your server down the road. Maybe someone will be kind enough to post a link that will fully explain this to help you better understand the reason. I just know its necessary. |
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| Author: | frometa [ Sun Nov 14, 2010 11:44 am ] |
| Post subject: | Re: How to successfully clone and upgrade a WHS system drive |
This is the best guide ever!!!. I've already used this guide twice. (This is the second drive I replaced in my upgrading frenzy). So far I've tried it with Acronis Home and Ghost32 V 11.5. I like Ghost better because it allows me to dial in the specified partition size in a simple way. The guide asks for removing the pool drives when putting the new system drive in, but It works with the pool drives in as well. I haven't tried using the old system drive in the MSS yet. Thank you!!!...... 
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| Author: | WiredRacing2 [ Mon Nov 22, 2010 3:57 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Serious problems with this approach... |
Hey guys, I just had to register to notify/warn others thinking about executing this process as I basically lost ALL my data (it's recovering just fine right now though). Here's my scenario.. Had a system drive with bad sectors. CRC's showing up. Event Viewer logs about bad sectors. Cloning such a disk can be difficult. I tried a few products, including gParted, but because the drive was flagged with bad sectors, gParted wouldn't clone the drive. So basically I ended up using DriveImage XML for the SYS volume and had problems with the 600gb in my DATA volume, so I tried xcopy with the ignore errors method. Anyhow much of it copied over, but not all of it. Now, there are/were 4 other drives in my pool. I didn't touch these, AT ALL, in this process. Following the steps verbatim (and electing NOT to remove my other data drives on the first boot) I cloned the UniqueID and put the new drive in. I made the necessary registry changes (though I fear the process may be missing some changes as InstanceID isn't talked about nor is another Size field) and rebooted. The only error remaining was an issue with the parallel port driver and a problem with an SSL key (which I haven't looked into yet). But then I looked at the storage pool. All my data was free. ??? I look at the DATA folder via explorer and sure enough only a small amount of data is there (I guess the few items xcopy got over). So I start pulling drives and hooking them up to other machines. Sure enough there's nothing in the data of most of them except for the one drive where it started to duplicate old folders. All the directories are there, but no data. Somehow.. WHS I guess.. reinitialized the drives. Now fortunately it looks like I should be able to recover a bug chunk of my data (anything replication didn't overright.. which is about 250mb vs about 4TB of data). But it does mean, something went very wrong here. I double checked my work and the values, the only mistake I Could see was under Manufacture Name,it would appear there was supposed to be a leading space " ", as I have other of the same drives in the machine and sure enough those have a space preceeding the device manager description. I would love it if someone could point out to me what happened here. Doesn't change anything for me mind you.. but might help someone else prevent it. In the meantime, I would recommend at the very least disconnecting your other data drives during that first boot when you're re-working the registry. Course if you can back up the data, all the better (but largely redundant to the point of the server in the first place no?). All I can say that was different here was I couldn't do a sector by sector clone and because it took me a couple days to migrate from my cramped case to a nice air-y mega-fan case, the CMOS battery gave up and reset itself. It's POSSIBLE.. a SCSI vs IDE mode got flipped.. but kind of odd how WHS handled it and it should be a caveat to be sure. Oh the sweet irony of trying to save myself a couple hours in reloading SQL Server and some other services running on this box by cloning vs repairing. Now I'm about 24 hours into the recovery with 2 drives to go. |
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| Author: | yakuza [ Mon Nov 22, 2010 5:06 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: How to successfully clone and upgrade a WHS system drive |
Thanks for sharing your experience and sorry it didn't go smoothly for you. I have to suspect that gparted wouldn't clone the drive for good reason. Myself and many others have performed this operation successfully, so I can only presume that you missed a step or made a mistake somewhere. This definitely isn't a simple, user friendly thing to do, the vast majority of users should simply use the built in Server Recovery feature to replace their system drive. |
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| Author: | WiredRacing2 [ Tue Nov 23, 2010 9:01 am ] |
| Post subject: | Re: How to successfully clone and upgrade a WHS system drive |
I didn't skip a step. I've been developing PC software for over 20 years. My first computer was an Osbourne. I was installing linux manually long before CD image installs were ever around. I've been around. I know what I'm doing from a general technical standpoint. I can follow directions and when dealing with data, double check my work. The point of the post is to alert people to the very real possibility that this procedure, if not done exactly a certain way, could very well cause full data loss. Which many people always think is just a general disclaimer (because, it usually is). WHS, for one reason or another, reinitialized these drives, on it's own. I don't know at what point, but once I was done all the steps, in order, this was the result. I didn't "+ Add" the drvies back in.. they were still there in the Storage Pool visible within the Console. As I say, I didn't touch them, at all. gParted didn't clone the drive because it has known bad sectors. It's solution to resolve it was to back it up (using ntfssomethingorother), and run chkdsk /F /R on the drive then ntfsresize --badsectors (or something like that). As gparted was a gui for (ntfsresize) and there was no in-gui method to change/set these flags, I decided not to mess around with command line execution on the drive I needed to clone. So I tried other tools (DriveImage XML) to achieve the same thing. The SYS drive seemed to backup/restore just fine. Anyhow, as I say, perhaps someone can pin-point the problem could be how WHS would treat a switch from IDE to SATA/SCSI mode because I couldn't remember what the CMOS *was* (i have 7 PCs in the house, I can't remember how they're all setup). But of course they were recognized just fine by whatever part of WHS identifies the storage pool. Perhaps, it somehow has to do with a file in the SYS drive that was corrupted just enough to trigger WHS to do what it did. Keep in mind, I don't think the process is flawed. I just don't think it fits all scenarios. Well, clearly it doesn't because *this* happened. But the ultimate culprit here was WHS and how/why it did this auto-intialization or whatever it did that killed the data pointers. But as I say, through undelete tools, it looks like I'll get most of it back. So it's not a total loss... But I would say the "cloning" process or the CMOS reset had a hand in it. If not... then I would be even more concerned about this process because a leading space you really can't see should not be the difference between success and catastrophic failure (if you don't think to try to recover the data). If anything, I would suggest the steps encourage people to disconnect their other DATA drives until the registry is "repaired" for the cloned drive and booting without errors (that don't involve "DATA Drive x is missing"). |
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| Author: | Neu5p3ed [ Thu Nov 25, 2010 7:19 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: How to successfully clone and upgrade a WHS system drive |
I made a mistake performing the extended data partition, when it was not needed and it is now showing under disk management and my computer the wrong amount of available space. Anyway I can correct this? Everything else seems to be working as should. I have added 2 screen shots to see if it would help explain what I am referring to. Attachment: freespace2.jpg [ 169 KiB | Viewed 35295 times ] Attachment: freespace.jpg [ 58.42 KiB | Viewed 35295 times ] |
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| Author: | ymboc [ Thu Nov 25, 2010 7:34 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: How to successfully clone and upgrade a WHS system drive |
Neu5p3ed: I think what you're seeing is normal. Aside from appearing unusual, I don't think anything is wrong. The freespace reported on 'D' in 'My Comptuer' and the DiskManagement Snap-In is actually the aggregate free space of all your drives in the pool. I don't think that changes as a result of having followed the instructions, but I could be wrong. My 'Disk Management' Add-in Tab reports the correct amount of free space, and my 'Server Storage' tab of course reports the free space of the entire pool (by design). |
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| Author: | Neu5p3ed [ Thu Nov 25, 2010 9:38 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: How to successfully clone and upgrade a WHS system drive |
Actually now that you mention that it makes sense. I wasn't looking at it correctly. Thanks |
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| Author: | brownbag [ Sat Dec 04, 2010 1:03 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: How to successfully clone and upgrade a WHS system drive |
Thanks for the great post. I have a Frankenbuild system. I was getting warnings about problems on my system Drive. It was an old 320GB EIDE drive. I replaced it with a 1TB SATA drive. I used Parted Magic (http://partedmagic.com/) and the Clonezilla app to clone the drive. I used the advanced wizard and took all defaults except for removing the selection to put Grub on the boot block. It's free, and it cloned perfect. I had an initial issue because my BIOS was trying to boot the drive as a [LARGE] drive. When I set it to [AUTO], everything booted right up. DiskPart showed that it had the same UniqueID as the original disk, so the only thing I had to do was use DiskPart to "Extend" the partition and I was all done. --Rod |
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| Author: | sygyzy [ Wed Dec 15, 2010 1:56 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: How to successfully clone and upgrade a WHS system drive |
Hi, I wanted to take the time to thank ymboc for coming up with this process and documenting it so throughly. I used it last night to save my MediaSmartServer and it went off without a hitch. I am detailing my experience in case it might help someone else. 1. The first thing I did was remove the failing disk (500GB stock SYS drive) and connect it to my Windows 7 PC using an external USB dock. I used Acronis True Image Home 2010 to create an image, storing it on an internal drive. I also made a copy of the \Windows\System32\Config folder to backup the registry (Part 2, Step 19) I should note here that I don't trust imaging and restores using external docks so I spent 20 minutes trying to connect the destination drive (1TB Seagate) and the host to the internal SATA connectors but both the Acronis recovery CD and Windows 7 would not boot. No matter what combination I tried, the system would not start up correctly. In fact, with the WHS SYS drive connected, my box actually tried to boot WHS instead of Win 7, even though I specified the Win 7 drive as the boot drive. So for those of you thinking of putting two bootable drives into the same system, be careful. 2. When my new drive arrived, I put it in the dock and used the Acronis restore feature from within Windows. At some point I checked a box and told it to transfer the "identity" (may not be correct wording) of the host drive over to the destination. I didn't know what this meant exactly but I had a clue. 3. I went to clone the unique disk id (Part 1, Step 14) but found that my suspicions were correct. The disk id had already been cloned. 4. [Part 2, Step 17] Used the extend feature and it made my DATA drive twice as large. Yay! 5. I removed my three data disks from the MSS and installed the fresh 1TB destination drive. I started up and connected via Remote Desktop Connection. 6. [Part 3, Step 25] I found that you can't cut and paste the disk friendly name from device manager so make sure you have notepad or something open so you can type out the name. Mine was dramatically different than the disk it replaced so I had to make sure everything was correct. This was not difficult but took longer than it should have because I had to juggle multiple layers of windows (some of them children windows) as I tried to get the information I needed. 7. [Part 3, Step 26] I did not have to modify the size and starting offset values. They were already correct for both C: and D: This step caused me some confusion and I almost messed up. Instead of going to the subfolder (that is not Attributes) like the instructions say clearly, I went to the parenta key directly under Volumes. That area also has the same values (size, offset) so I thought I was in the right section. Remember: the area you need to look at only has two entries: (Default) and one with an offset number. 8. [Part 3, Step 27] - This was the most difficult part for me. The reason is the values stored in \DosDevices\C: and \DosDevices\D: are not simple text. They are hexidecimal with random ASCII characters. It's easy to cut and paste 1234567890 but it's a little nerve racking to copy all these little symbols. In the screenshots they look so pretty like a row of pairs of numbers. But in reality it's two rows with offset code. Anyway, I held my breath and cut and paste the values and it worked. 9. I shutdown the system. Connected up my data drives and restarted. Everything works perfectly! |
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| Author: | Bert-Jan [ Thu Dec 30, 2010 4:12 am ] |
| Post subject: | Re: How to successfully clone and upgrade a WHS system drive |
Thank you ymboc! The system drive in my EX490 was showing more and more CRC errors and I dreaded having to do a full system restore. Followed your guide to the letter and now have a new 2TB system drive humming along beautifully! This for me has been one of the most usefull guides I've ever come across. My experience, just for info: - Bought a Sharkoon SATA Quickport Duo (since my workstation doesn't have enough free space to hold the image from the 1 TB old system drive, and I wanted the Sharkoon anyway  )- Bought a Samsung HD204UI (it is an advanced format drive, but dbone1026 wrote he didn't have any problems with it. http://www.mediasmartserver.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=9141) - Used Acronis True Image Home 2011 to do the cloning and used automaic re-sizing. Cloning took 7 hours... - Used your amazing guide. Did not remove the other 3 data drives - encountered no problems at all!  Thanks again!! P.S. Not really important, but I think you switched the screenshots under 26.5 and 26.8 |
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| Author: | wpoole8 [ Mon Jan 10, 2011 12:09 am ] |
| Post subject: | Re: How to successfully clone and upgrade a WHS system drive |
Ymboc, your instructions are excellent. I have one small thing to add, which is that I used the Acronis Home 2011 software trial and found that the disk clone feature is not enabled in the trial version. So I shelled out the $49 since I will have other use for the software anyhow. It does clone the disk nicely, including growing the partitions based on the larger volume. It took a remarkably long time to do the clone: ~6 hours to clone a SEagate 667GB drive to a new 2T Caviar Green drive. I was thrilled to see the WHS tray icon on one of my PCs come up green after I did the final server reboot. Going to Server Storage on the console shows all three drives as being there, but it took nearly 10 minutes to calculate the amount of free storage the first time. Had me worried, but it finished and correctly shows the extra 1.6T of storage! I do have one minor anomoly, which is that the storage hard drive names do not seem to be updated in the WHS console display. The system drive still shows the mfg name of the original Seagate drive I had in there ("ST375064 0AS SATA Disk Drive"). I assume this is just registry detritis that I don't need to worry about. Thanks again for the excellent instructions!! Will |
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| Author: | Comp1962 [ Sat Jan 22, 2011 9:20 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: How to successfully clone and upgrade a WHS system drive |
When the guide was first posted it was my intention to test it out but I got side tracked and so today I gave it a try because I wanted to swap out my system drive. I used the program EASEUS because it was mentioned that it would also clone the Disk ID but that did not happen but hey I will try anything once. The software did clone the drive and I followed the Guide and now the new drive is running perfectly. |
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| Author: | erail [ Sat Jan 22, 2011 9:35 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: How to successfully clone and upgrade a WHS system drive |
wpoole8 wrote: I do have one minor anomoly, which is that the storage hard drive names do not seem to be updated in the WHS console display. The system drive still shows the mfg name of the original Seagate drive I had in there ("ST375064 0AS SATA Disk Drive"). I assume this is just registry detritis that I don't need to worry about. Thanks again for the excellent instructions!! Will In step 25 of the Guide it instructs you to change the Friendly Name of the Drive, which you apparently didn't do. That will get the correct name for you. I think you can change it now. |
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| Author: | ymboc [ Sun Jan 30, 2011 9:17 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: How to successfully clone and upgrade a WHS system drive |
Bert-Jan wrote: P.S. Not really important, but I think you switched the screenshots under 26.5 and 26.8 Fixed! Thanks!wpoole8 wrote: I have one small thing to add, which is that I used the Acronis Home 2011 software trial and found that the disk clone feature is not enabled in the trial version. So I shelled out the $49 since I will have other use for the software anyhow. Reminder: free + working versions of acronis software are often available from the hard drive manufacturers... plus a number of users have reported success using a variety of free/opensource software - browse the thread to find out what worked for whom.Some Free Versions Available: Acronis True Image WD Edition Software (Free for WD Users) Seagate DiscWizard (by Acronis) (Free for Seagate & Maxtor Users). |
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