I know this has been asked many times in different flavors. Bottom line, I want to do a fresh install (not a recovery) of WHS 2011. Can I reinstall the OS onto my C: drive, and maintain all of my data on my D, E, F,G, H, I, etc... drives?

I have read that you will lose data on the D: drive, but cannot confirm.

How do I add all my data drives back in? Is it a simple process?

Thanks - nick

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The only thing I am unsure of is the Client Data if it can be preserved and used again after the reinstall. For your other data I do not see this as a problem. As a precaution I would perform the reinstall with my storage drives disconnected and I would not reuse the current system drive as a precaution if something went wrong that way you could reconnect the current system drive and existing storage drives and get back to where your at now. Always protect what you have now so you can get out of trouble should something go horribly wrong.

Anyway I would perform the new install with the drives disconnected then I would shut the server down and reconnect all your data drives. Then after rebooting just install any software you were previously using that you still require and setup the shares to point to the data on the drives and you should be fine as WHS2011 will not reformat the drives unless you tell it to do so. However this may not be the case with your Server Backup Drives.

When I migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E I did the install exactly as I mentioned above and it worked well for me and I see no reason why it would not work for WHS2011 as well but what I can not answer is the question about Client Data or any Server Backup Drive configuration as I have never messed with this part.

Since I am overly cautious with my data I would recommend you do two things. Make sure your most important data is safely backed up and then I would get a 2nd opinion about what I have written just to give you piece of mind and to provide you with piece of mind that what your about to do will work without issues.

Once you have completed your task I would also recommend setting up a dedicated drive for automated server backups so that you can perform a recovery from those backups to a point in time where you knew your server was running well. You can also run a manual server backup for this same purpose. If you have this then its will make your task easier and will take about 1 hour at the most to recover without having to reconfigure the server in anyway.

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Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

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