Convert a WHS 2011 box to an HTPC - little complicated

[mazeroth]

I built a WHS 2011 box a few years ago with two 2TB internal hard drives. I installed WHS on one of the hard drives. I do not use the functionality of WHS at all with this box. All I do with it is store home videos, pictures and movies on it that I want to access on other computers in the house, which I probably could have done just as easily using Win7. I have a single 2TB external that I use for backup, which is done manually. Once a month or so I will plug the external into my main computer (WHS computer is in the basement) and copy over the new pictures and videos. I know, not the most efficient way but my networking skills are weak and it really only takes me about 5 minutes a month to do. No big deal.

Well, I now want to hook up another HTPC and figured I might as well reuse the WHS computer to do this. I have a spare 128GB SSD that will be the boot/app drive. I will install this drive solo and install Windows 7 on it. I then would like to plug in the two 3.5" 2TB drives that already have data on them. My concern is how can I uninstall WHS on the one drive and not cause problems by potentially having 2 OS's? Do I uninstall it before I install the SSD boot drive? I really have no idea.

After installing Windows 7 and getting the extra drives figured out I just need to turn on Homegroup so all the computers can use the files on the new computer, correct?

Thanks in advance for any help! I greatly appreciate it!

 

[avos]

The big thing will be to change the primary boot drive in the bios to use your SSD.

Once that is done you really don't have to do anything special with the drive that has WHS2011 installed on it. When your new Windows 7 starts up it will just treat it as another storage drive. Add it to your existing Homegroup and yes you should be good to go.

That said. You might want to consider continue using the WHS 2011 as a NAS and install something like Plex on it. A Plex server and either a Chromecast or an Amazon Firestick I've found to be great alternatives to using a full HTPC. It is just so much easier to plug $35 Chromecasts into the back of tv's and control it all from a phone app. The only thing still missing from this setup is something like Steam In-Home Streaming.

The firestick is nice if you want a physical remote. But the ease of streaming youtube, pandora, WatchESPN, and more to the chromecast straight from a phone is amazing. The android plex app has gotten really great too.

 

[azazel1024]

The big thing will be to change the primary boot drive in the bios to use your SSD.

Once that is done you really don't have to do anything special with the drive that has WHS2011 installed on it. When your new Windows 7 starts up it will just treat it as another storage drive. Add it to your existing Homegroup and yes you should be good to go.

That said. You might want to consider continue using the WHS 2011 as a NAS and install something like Plex on it. A Plex server and either a Chromecast or an Amazon Firestick I've found to be great alternatives to using a full HTPC. It is just so much easier to plug $35 Chromecasts into the back of tv's and control it all from a phone app. The only thing still missing from this setup is something like Steam In-Home Streaming.

The firestick is nice if you want a physical remote. But the ease of streaming youtube, pandora, WatchESPN, and more to the chromecast straight from a phone is amazing. The android plex app has gotten really great too.

Except if NTFS, which I assume it is, likely going to have some nice and fun user write privellage issues since you are reusing the OS drive with a new install without taking ownership of the files.