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Dual booting Windows 7 and WHS

N

nemoshotyany

Senior member
I currently have a custom build windows home server and a laptop. I was planning on building a desktop to handle all my video editing and etc. I figured instead of dumping all that money into building a new desktop I could use my windows home server as well as the parts I already purchased. Anyone who has used windows home server before knows that it has too many restrictions to function as a regular desktop computer. So what I figured I do it create a dual boot machine. I have 4 1 TB Hard Drives that I was going to use for raid 10 for the home server and a 40 GB Kingston SDD that I was going to install Windows 7 on. I haven't created a dual boot system in a while. Is it possible for me to be able to access the files that are on the WHS while loaded into Windows 7? What problems might I run into? Please advise?
 
Technically speaking, you could probably get away with this. However I can not possibly emphasize enough at just how bad of an idea this is. WHS is meant to be run on a dedicated box (or at least its own VM), period.

With that out of the way, the biggest problem is that WHS needs to be in control of any modifications to its data drives in order to keep tombstones in working order; you must to mount the data drives as read-only in order to avoid screwing them up and causing WHS to disown them. The second issue is that any files stored under WHS are going to be scattered among your drives, so besides not being able to ever write anything, you're going to have to check multiple drives to see which one contains the file you're looking for.

So yes, this is technically possible. But there are a million and one ways you can screw this up and nuke your WHS installation or the drives. You really shouldn't do this.
 
As Virge notes, Shared Data on the WHS server needs to be accessed through the WHS Drive Extender (which would only be running while WHS is running). If you access data directly, WHS will lose track of your data.

And you won't be able to back up your desktop PC if IT isn't running.

So you'll lose the two main functions of WHS: File server and desktop backup.
 
Under this circumstances why do you need WHS?

Just use the drives for straight storage.

If you want some sort of auto backup and redundancy you can do with software.
 
Thanks for the responses. I figured that it wasn't the best idea and that I was overlooking some things. I could do without backing up the windows 7 portion as long as I could move the files over to the whs manually. I use WHS so i can access my files anywhere and its easier to access from home. But thanks to all the helpful responses I decided to scrap the idea. I just don't want to have a third computer in my room.
 
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