Norton Ghost of WHS OS drive won't work?

[VirtualLarry]

I read from someone on here that WHS keys in on the physical serial number of the OS root drive, and even if you did a binary clone of that HD onto an identical physical drive, that the OS will fail to boot.

Is this true, and what options are there to backup/restore/fix a WHS box, if the main system HD goes kaput.

 

[Rubycon]

That does not make sense - what about logical drives comprised of physical disks arrayed on an intelligent host? If the volume is imaged (Acronis) it should not matter.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Well, the other problem is that WHS uses it's own filesystem, so existing cloning tools will fail to work, even if there is a workaround for the drive serial number issue.

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
Well, the other problem is that WHS uses it's own filesystem, so existing cloning tools will fail to work, even if there is a workaround for the drive serial number issue.

False, WHS uses NTFS. As to your original post, that information is false as well.

 

[Griffinhart]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
Is this true, and what options are there to backup/restore/fix a WHS box, if the main system HD goes kaput.

Well, I haven't put it to the test, but my HP Home server came with a WHS recovery DVD and when you plug in a drive one of the options is to back up the server itself. I did so with an external hard drive. So, while I haven't tested it, I do believe I can recover my server in the event of a HD failure.

 

[Raduque]

Cloning the WHS System drive will not work, the correct way to handle a failing system drive is to replace it (using the EXACT SAME PORT as the old drive) leave ALL drives connected, and do a "Recovery" install onto the new System drive using the WHS dvd. WHS will automatically recover and rebuild the Storage Pool and all you'll have to do is re-create the user accounts. There also exists kludges to keep and transfer client computer backups from a WHS install to another.

Griffenhart, I believe your "Recovery DVD" is simply a normal WHS install disk - it just does a "Recovery" install if all the drives are present and functional, and a "Reinstall" if some are missing.

Bsobel, please link to information backing up your claim? Everything I've read on the Microsoft WHS forums states that cloning will not work.

 

[bsobel]

Bsobel, please link to information backing up your claim? Everything I've read on the Microsoft WHS forums states that cloning will not work.

a) VL claimed WHS used its own file system. It uses NTFS. If you want to prove a 'claim' otherwise, feel free to show what file system it uses.

b) As for cloning:

http://social.microsoft.com/Fo...af8-91a8-021466eb5e7e/
http://social.technet.microsof...4f9e-a6c7-1f51f8c11d5a

So to be more useful, how about linking to where MS states this doesnt work.

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: Raduque
... the correct way to handle a failing system drive is to replace it (using the EXACT SAME PORT as the old drive) leave ALL drives connected, and do a "Recovery" install onto the new System drive using the WHS dvd. WHS will automatically recover and rebuild the Storage Pool and all you'll have to do is re-create the user accounts.

I haven't done a system recovery of Windows Home Server, but this Microsoft Forum FAQ does state that you can just replace the system drive with a new one and do a "SERVER REINSTALLATION" of Windows Home Server using the normal WHS Install DVD. It will (slowly) rebuild the server and file system, minus any WHS add-ins, minus any User accounts, minus any custom web sites, minus the client backup database, and minus any non-duplicated shared files that were only the failed disk,

"Summary of instructions:

Primay disk fails (or you want to replace it with a bigger one)
* Shut the system down, yankout the drive and put the new drive in
* Boot the system from the Windows Home Server setup DVD
* When it asks what kind of installation you want choose "Server Reinstallation"
* We will re-create the 20GB system partition as well as the primary data partition
* Drive extender will do what we call a "RebuildPrimary"
* When done you will have to re-create user accounts in the console, re-setup Remote Access, re-install and setup add-ins, and reconfigure any other setting change you may have done."

 

[VirtualLarry]

I dunno, I read on here (these forums) that it used it's own filesystem for the data drives. If that's not true then I apologize. I'm not a WHS expert yet (having just recieve the trial edition DVDs and not having installed them yet), so I have to go off of the information that I've recieved in the past.

But I thought that was the primary reason why you cannot just "add" drives (with files already on them) to WHS, that you HAVE to use the WHS console to reformat the drives after installing them.

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
I dunno, I read on here (these forums) that it used it's own filesystem for the data drives. If that's not true then I apologize. I'm not a WHS expert yet (having just recieve the trial edition DVDs and not having installed them yet), so I have to go off of the information that I've recieved in the past.

But I thought that was the primary reason why you cannot just "add" drives (with files already on them) to WHS, that you HAVE to use the WHS console to reformat the drives after installing them.

Larry, WHS supports two types of drives. One is a normal 'drive' which is not part of the storage pool. These drives can be used to backup the WHS itself or as additional server local storage.

The second type of drives is one added to the storage pool. Those drives are 'owned' by WHS and it manages all of the data on them (thats the reason it warns you and formats them, as it expects to be 'in charge' of everything there). You can't mix and match (e.g. you can't say this directory is mine the rest belongs to WHS.

Those drives are formatted with NTFS and mounted as junction points. The WHS drive extender technology is just an NTFS minifilter which 'moves' the actual data among the drives as it sees fit. Initially the data is put on the 'D' volume of WHS, as the data is moved to an actual storage drive the data on the D drive is converted into an NTFS reparse point (WHS calls these tombstone files). Those reparse points link to the copy (or copies) of the actual data on the storage drives.

One coming limitation on the storage pool drives is that WHS currently formats them as basic and not dynamic disks, this means each INDIVIDUAL storage drive is limited to 2TB. I presume this will be fixed in the next version as moving to the dynamic disks will allow for >2TB storage drives to be used.

The practical limitation of this is that your storage pool is limited to 2TB x number of storage drives at the moment.

 

[VirtualLarry]

That's good to know, Bill. I guess I won't be running WHS for the time being on my fileserver box, because I plan on running several RAID arrays on that, and one is going to be 5x500GB RAID5 (2TB), and one is going to be 5x750GB (3TB). So there will be a problem with the 3TB volume.

Actually, there's probably several reason why I won't run WHS on that machine. One is that I've heard that RAID isn't a good idea for WHS. Why? I guess the complexity of recovering from a failure, or something. WHS has that file-level duplication feature rather than disk-level RAID. The other, is that I don't think it's probably a good idea to have multiple WHS servers on a single LAN. (Or is it? Comments?)

I have a quad-GPU F@H rig, that has (sadly, only four) SATA ports on the mobo, and rather than waste that box doing only F@H, I thought that I could turn it into WHS, and use the CPU/network/disk resources and put them to good use, while the GPUs crunch away at F@H. I plan on putting four 640GB WD 6400AAKS HDs into the box, that is, if I can physically fit them in along with the 4 GPUs and their power connectors. It's a pretty tight fit in an Antec 300.

Then I'll have my pure fileserver box, with the two (in the future, three) RAID5 arrays.

Is there any way to get WHS to utilize networked shares as locations for the storage pool? I realize that might be non-sensical due to the increased network traffic, but I thought I would ask.

 

[bsobel]

Drives have to be local, NAS or other network drives wont work. As far as raid. I have a raid controller (12x 512gb drives) and I mirror the WHS boot volume but treat the other 10 drives as individual drives so WHS can manage them (prior they were raid 6).

Basically it comes down to relying on raid or trust WHS to manage storage, your right its best not to do both. In your example, you'd break your arrays and let WHS manage the 5 500s and the 5 750s itself (albeit, Id probably recommend doing what I did, mirror the system drive

Bill

 

[Raduque]

Originally posted by: bsobel

Bsobel, please link to information backing up your claim? Everything I've read on the Microsoft WHS forums states that cloning will not work.

a) VL claimed WHS used its own file system. It uses NTFS. If you want to prove a 'claim' otherwise, feel free to show what file system it uses.

b) As for cloning:

http://social.microsoft.com/Fo...af8-91a8-021466eb5e7e/
http://social.technet.microsof...4f9e-a6c7-1f51f8c11d5a

So to be more useful, how about linking to where MS states this doesnt work.

I wasn't talking about his statement that WHS uses it's own file system I was asking for links about cloning the System drive. Everything I'd read on the WHS forum stated it would be more difficult to try and recover to a cloned drive than it would to just do a simple "Server Reinstallation". I never said Microsoft said it could'nt be done, I simply said that what I got out of all the topics I read, that it wouldn't work.