I have the EX487 with 2 750 GB hard drives. I was able to get WHS 2011 installed last night successfully. My question is about the available space on my hard drives. When I did the install, I took the bottom one out, put it in my PC, did the install until first reboot, shut down, put it back in ex487.

When I remote in to my whs (windows remote desktop) and look at my drives. It shows 3:

Local Disk C: 46.9 GB free of 59.9 GB
DATA D: 241 GB free of 698 GB
Local Disk E: 614 GB free of 638 GB

C: I get because the OS is there. Since these 2 drives are both 750 GB, I'm not sure why E: only has 638 total and not 750 (or slightly less). I'm also not sure why D: is only showing 241 free when there are no files on it. I'm assuming 1 drive has 2 partitions, and the other one just has one.

Did I screw up the install? Maybe I"m just not understanding the layout of WHS.

Thanks for any help or advice.

No one?

Were these two drives from a previous windows home server install? If so, there are hidden drive extender folders which have all your files from your previous WHS installation!

I think I see what's going on here. A 750 GB drive is 750 GB based on a gigabyte being 1,000,000,000 bytes. Convert that based on a gigabyte being 1,073,741,824 bytes, and that's how you get to the 698 GB figure.

If you look very carefully, it would appear that your C: and E: partitions are on the first physical disk, and your D: drive has taken residence on the second physical disk. I'm not sure how you pulled that off; perhaps you had the second disk in the server when you built it. When I built mine, I did so with only the first (bottom) disk in the server, and added the other three after WHS 2011 was up and running.

Drive C @ 59.9 GB + Drive E @ 638 GB + hidden system disk @ 100 MB = 698 GB (first disk)
Drive D @ 698 GB = 698 GB (second disk)

Fire up Disk Management and you'll see that what you've probably got is the layout I've shown above. The hidden system partition probably appears first, followed by C: and then E:, with D: on the second disk. The hidden system disk contains the Windows Boot Manager, separate from the OS system volume, which would enable you to set up BitLocker Drive Encryption on the system volume (the boot manager cannot be encrypted).

Hope this sheds some light on the subject.

_________________
Matt Sawyer
Owner, Dojo North Software, LLC

HP EX490, 4GB, E5300, 15TB - Server 2012 - Sharing and Streaming
HP EX487, 4GB, E5300, 13TB - Server 2012 Essentials - Backups