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Couple of WHS Questions. Hypothetical failure situations. Possible to restore computer through wifi?

N

nobb

Senior member
I am building a WHS machine and just waiting for the parts to come in. I just have a few questions.

I currently have a very old machine running Windows 2000 with a single 640gb drive formatted in NTFS and using that as a cheap NAS. With my new WHS build, I will install WHS onto a main 80GB drive, then add the old 640GB drive (with data). Is it possible to add the old drive to the WHS pool without formatting and losing all the data?

Also, lets say the main 80GB WHS drive fails and I have to do a reinstall of WHS. What about all my data that is stored on the previous 640GB (or other redundant drives)? Will the data still be there?

Finally, I am just wondering about the computer image backup feature. Is it possible to restore computers through wifi, or go I have to plug the computer into an ethernet port on my router to be able to restore them? I have no idea how the wifi drivers would be loaded to allow for wifi access...
 
You can BACK UP over wifi, but you can't restore. The problem is that there's no way to tell the WiFi device to join a wireless network, and no way to get it to authenticate, either. You probably wouldn't be very happy with the restore speed over WiFi anyway.

I'd probably forget the 80 GB as a system drive and install WHS on the 640 GB. It's likely got a longer lifetime (newer) and you'll be stuck with that 80 GB drive "forever" if it's the System drive. If you add the 80 GB as a data drive, you can always tell WHS to remove the drive later and it'll move the stored files so you can take it out and replace it with a larger drive.

You'll have to find somewhere to put your data files temporarily. WHS needs to re-format any drives used for its system or storage pool. If you don't have any place to put those files, you probably should get something anyway, since that means you have no place to make backups of whatever's on that 640 GB drive.
 
Ok, that makes sense. I guess I should install WHS on the 640GB instead.

But let's say I decide to add more drives in the future and make use of WHS's built in file mirroring feature on the other drives (for extra redundancy). If the main drive in which WHS is installed fails (yet the data is still on some of the other drives), then how would I go about recovering those files? After a reinstall, wouldn't I have to format those drives before they are recognized by WHS?

My initial reasoning for using the 80GB as a system drive was that should it fail, I would just reinstall WHS on another 80GB drive (Ive got a bunch laying around) and then the data on the 640GB would still be intact.
 
Originally posted by: nobb
Ok, that makes sense. I guess I should install WHS on the 640GB instead.

But let's say I decide to add more drives in the future and make use of WHS's built in file mirroring feature on the other drives (for extra redundancy). If the main drive in which WHS is installed fails (yet the data is still on some of the other drives), then how would I go about recovering those files? After a reinstall, wouldn't I have to format those drives before they are recognized by WHS?

My initial reasoning for using the 80GB as a system drive was that should it fail, I would just reinstall WHS on another 80GB drive (Ive got a bunch laying around) and then the data on the 640GB would still be intact.
Click to expand...

WHS partitions the boot drive into two parts, one 20gb system, and the rest as a drive that gets added to the pool. If you have file duplication on, there's two copies of all your files. So, in the case that the boot drive fails, you replace the drive and reinstall WHS using "Server Reinstall" during setup. It'll rebuild what are called "tombstones" (basically, file pointers for the drive extender service) and recover your files. Actually, the files are all still there, but the tombstones are what WHS uses to manage the duplication.
 
Originally posted by: nobb
My initial reasoning for using the 80GB as a system drive was that should it fail, I would just reinstall WHS on another 80GB drive (Ive got a bunch laying around) and then the data on the 640GB would still be intact.
Click to expand...
This doesn't quite work because you can't tell WHS where to put your files. It'd use both the 80 GB and the 640 GB drives for data storage.

If you want, you can add one or more 80 GB drives and enable folder redundancy. With 160 GB of space on two other drives, you can have multi-drive redundancy for 160 GB of data.
 
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