So, yesterday I cloned my IDE WD 160 Gb System disk to a Samsung 750 Gb Sata using Acronis True Image 2011 in the boottable USB version.

The procedure:

1) Turned Off the WHS
2) Unplugged the 9 Data Disks
3) Plugged the Samsung 750 Sata Disk
4) Boot via USB into the Acronis True Image 2011 environment
5) Clone the WD 160 Gb to the Samsung 750 Gb applying the proportional clonig mode
6) Turn off the WHS
7) Unplug both disk (original IDE and new SATA cloned)
Set the Uniquie-ID, via Windows7 PC, to the 750 Gb sata disk
9) Reinsert the new disk into the WHS
10) Go to the entire registry procedure
11) Reboot...

PERFECT!

But....

Since the Samsung 750Gb was only an old faulty disk picked up from the drawer only to test the procedure, at the end I replaced it with the old WD 160 IDE disk and restored the original WHS hardware setup replugged also the DATA Disk.
Note that during the test with the Sambung disk I've only verified that the System Disk was correctly managed my the system, so in theory the very original setup could be untouched.

Turnig on the original setup... HORROR!!!!!!

The system tels me that it founds a new Disk Drive! Then asked me to reboot again.
At the reboot, the Backup Service failed to start up because the system doesn't recognise the Original System Disk.

After the Panic, I turned off the WHS and plugged the IDE disk into the Win7 PC to verify the UniqueID...

It was changed!!!! How?

Setted It again to the original value, the WHS was perfectly restored to full functionality.

But the question is, how the Acronis did changed the original Unique ID during the cloning procedure?

BTW, in the Week End I try to clone the 750 Sata into a Raid 1 array created with 2 disk and the Promise Fast Track TX4310 controller. The question is: An Hardware Raid 1 Array has its own UniqueID in spite of the fisical disk, or anyway each disk of the array mantain their ID? Maybe on Monday I'll have the answer.

IT WORKS!!!!

At the end I got rid of the SPOF (Single Point Of Failure) of the WHS, the System Disk!

I successifully cloned the Sistem Disk into an Hardware Raid1 Array!

Now I can sleep...

Thanks for sharing your experience, and glad it worked for you.

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Alex Kuretz
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I successfully cloned my 2TB system drive onto a 60 gig SSD. I have the default 20 gig system partition with the balance for D.

All the data from the original D partition from the 2TB drive has been moved to the pool.

Does anyone have any tips on maximizing the efficientcy of the SSD ?

I've turned off pagefile.

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HP Microserver N40L with 4GB ram, 8TB storage WHS with Active Directory, WDS, Subsonic, Wordpress, MediaCenterMaster + HP Microserver N40L, 8GB ram, Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials added to the WHS domain.
Microsoft MVP - Windows Home Server.

Well two nights ago I followed the step by step instructions from this thread to replace stock 750gb drive in my EX485 with a WD EARX20 2TB Green drive (AFD). I used WD's Acronis software (AFD-aware) that is free to use from their website if you have a WD drive. I did not have to do any alignment or use any jumpers, it all worked great!!!

Huge thanks to ymboc and all the others that figured this out!

My primary 750GB was failing on mij H340.
As it originally came with two 750 I decided to use this procedure to swap the drives.
The other 750GB had been replaced by a bigger disk some time ago and is barely used.
(data disks are 2 x 2TB and one 1TB)
I followed the procedures and, as the disks are identical I only had to change the Disk ID
I did check all the steps but all parameters in the registry were ok.
I did boot without the other data disks to check the registry.

Now after shutting down, adding the DATA disks and rebooting the machine does start up, and I see a LOT of disk activity, but:
-the machine can not be reached by RDP
-the blue drive-lights don't come on.

After 'booting' like this for more than half an hour I 'killed' it with the power button.
Then rebooted without the data disks but it sticks to the endless booting routine.

So it booted ok initially without the data disks, then took ages booting with the data disks (no RDP, no IP).
(Remember I did not change anything in the registry as the disks were identical, the imaging went perfect.)
And now it does not boot anymore.

Ill be checking my data disks now, because I'm scared they might have been formatted...

--continued--
Well DATA disks are ok.
I reinstalled the 'failing disk' without the data disks and got the two red lights indicating No OS...
** SHOCK**
Shut down and put everything in, DATA and SYS and after a bit of boot-time everything seems back to 'ok'
(HomeServer SMART is still finding the disk with 11 bad sectors and 53 pending bad sectors.)

The cloned drive is hooked up to my pc and showing lots of errors on the DATA partition with CHKDSK, but this could be due to the 'powerdown' I did.

So, an unsuccessful story for me, while I thought using an identical disk would be the easy way......

Any contributions anyone?

Tnx,
Albert

I have been putting off installing SMART to my server but I finally got around to it. Of course, it tells me my Seagates are both failing. I knew it was happening but needed the confirmation. A quick trip to NewEgg got me 2x 2TB Hitachi's and I was ready to get rid of the SeaGates. The first one came out easy. The second was the problem... it was the system drive. Luckily, this post was here and I followed it to a T and everything worked out great! Awesome post and a lifesaver! I initially tried using Reflect as a clone software but it would not clone both partitions for some reason so I gave up and went with SeaGate's software. That worked like a charm (took about 10 hours to image the 750 GB drive to a 2TB). I did the registry edits and everything is up and running perfectly and now I have 8TB on my server. Thanks again for the post and keep up the good work!!

Viral

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Desktop: Win7 Ult, i7 920 OC'd to 4.312Ghz
HTPC: Win7 Ult, ATOM D945GCLF2 1.6GHz
PS2,PS3,PSP,XBox,XBox 360
HP EX485, 8.00TB Storage

I guess that the process outlined also will work for a storage drive?

I have a situation where sys (drive 0) have 53 sector reallocated in the last month. I have a drive 2, 1.5TB that I want as the new drive 0. I could simply remove drive 2 from storage, but that would reallocate data mainly to the drive 0, something that I want to avoid.

I was thinking a two-step process:

Clone and switch drive 2: 1.5TB with a new 2TB and then clone and switch failing drive 0 1TB with 1.5TB.

Any thoughts?

While you could try to adapt the concepts from the procedure to clone/replace a storage drive...

I'd highly recommend using the WHS-based drive replacement mechanisms instead.

Specifically I would add the replacement drive to the pool via sata/eSata/USB or some other alternative interface and then remove the bad drive from the pool.

If the drive is in such a bad state that it stalls on the removal step (due to bad sectors) and provided you have folder-duplication enabled you could simply physically detach the drive and then remove the 'missing' drive from the pool after you've already added its replacement to the pool. WHS will then (re)create the replacement duplicate/redundancy files on the new drive.

The bad drive is the sys-drive. So that cannot be removed from storage pool. I will be adding the new 2TB via eSATA and remove the 1.5TB (drive 2) and then use the freed drive for cloning and replacing the failing sys-drive. Hopefully WHS will prefer reallocate data to the new 2TB over the storage area on drive 0. WHS seem to keep as little data as possible on drive 0, pushing data to other drives in the storage pool if possible. I guess that data on drive 0 storage pool is mainly duplicate data that can go missing without harm if sys fails? I have no facts backing this assumption, just a gut feeling what WHS seem to do with data on the drives in the storage pool.

My System disk was on it's way out and needed replacing. Aside from my HP server, I'm all Mac OS X around here. I was advised that to clone and replace the drive I'd need to borrow a PC. I was lent a netbook and after unsuccessfully trying commercial cloning software (another story) I tried Clonezilla. After getting Clonezilla to boot on the PC, it took 20+ hrs to clone the 1TB System disk. After the clone was finished, I went to reboot into Windows and the netbook complained and refused to boot. No matter what repair options I tried, they weren't successful - this left me rather embarrassed when I had to return the PC

At this point I was only half way through the upgrade and without an operational PC to use, I resorted to using a Virtual PC on my Mac. (I wish I tried this to begin with!) I was able to successfully finish the upgrade (Change diskID etc) and the server was back operational again.

However..

I now get the occasional error stating that the volume SYS is failing and I should run Repair to fix. Can anyone explain what this error is and what is the "Repair" that is needed?


Note: For other Mac users, you can successfully perform the clone and upgrade of your server using a Virtual PC option. I used VMWare running Windows 7

Thank you ymboc and yakuza for your detailed notes on cloning my WHS1 system drive. Following your notes I've successfully cloned my original 1TB WD10EADS drive to a 2TB Seagate ST2000DM001 using Acronis True Image 11 Home. All good: changed the uniqueid disk as you advised, and changed the Manufacturer name in the Registry (Part 3. step 26). But now have come to a halt at Step 26. 5. - changing the "..name of the entry so it matches the value shown in the "StartingOffset" column.. ". When I click on this key I can edit the 'value' field ok (the next step .. 6.) but the 'name' field is greyed out and not editable. In both cases these fields are different to the WMIC details - so what can I do to change the greyed out 'name' field (step 26. item 5)? ('Editing Binary' looks possible but for me that's going-where-there-be-dragons so I cancelled my way back from that quicktime. BTW I am doing this via console/VGA access directly on the server). Any advice would be much appreciated as I feel so close to the finish now. Thanks

You can rename the key by right clicking on it and selecting rename.

Good Luck!

Great guide. Quick question - if I wanted to replace my current system drive with a smaller one, how would I go about shrinking the data partition? I.e the opposite of what's done in Part 2 of the guide. I want to replace my current 250Gb system drive (five years old and failing) with, say, a 60Gb SSD. If it's going to be near impossible to get an SSD working with WHSv1, then I'm probably just as well getting a new normal HD.

I have gone through the cloning process and my machine seems to be coming up fine. Weird thing is when I run the WMIC command of partition get Name, StartingOffset, Size it seems to time out. My box a EX495 seems to be running fine, I get green icons and the server is responsive.

Any thoughts?

Also, just noticing I can't get into the server console.