WHS v1 re-install

edgedemon · 16 Mar 2012 at 22:26

Typical!

After watching movies all evening, somehow, with no drive warnings, and in between turning the light off in the lounge and both of us getting ready for bed, my WHS OS drive decided to die

It is an old IDE drive that has done well, so I cant complain..

Im not ready to go to 2011 yes, drive extender is too good for me, and I have 9TB of movies so will have problems when I migrate.

Im also probably going to have to source another IDE drive as I have all 6 sata drive ports for storage.

As a stop gap solution and to get us up and running again, can I use a portable usb drive as my os drive as a temp measure?

I understand it would be slower, but once booted up and running it should be usable?

Also, once I have an OS again, can I just re-connect my storage drives, or will I have to plug a large drive in and copy my data over drive by drive??

jamesfreddie · 16 Mar 2012 at 23:32

I don't think it is possible to use a USB HDD as a OS drive on WHS.

I would look around for a cheap IDE drive and try and clone the drive to another one.

ChileanLlama · 17 Mar 2012 at 14:21

If your hardware can treat the USB drive as just another HD, it might work - though it won't be very fast.

When you do get a new drive you should be able to choose a re-install option, this _should_ leave your data intact. If the option is not available then it will wipe all drives connected during the install process.

If you don't have a backup though I'd be tempted to try and move the data from one of your drives elsewhere temporarily and use that with the new OS drive. Leave all your other drives with data on disconnected.

Once you've got your OS reinstalled, start reconnecting your data drives and manually shuffle the data from the data drives to the new pool drive, as you empty each drive then add that to the pool.

platypus · 19 Mar 2012 at 15:46

edgedemon said:
Im not ready to go to 2011 yes, drive extender is too good for me, and I have 9TB of movies so will have problems when I migrate.

I'm in the same boat but now considering it, given that driveextender addins are out of beta. Check out StableBit DrivePool.