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Formatting All Harddisks

Locked Formatting All Harddisks

  • Sunday, 25 February 2007 10:18 AM
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    Hello,

    I think that formatting all found hard disks during setup is definitively not the way to go, at least not on a non preinstalled system. If the customer is purchasing the software in a box and takes an own machine to install it on which he may have used for backups already before, formatting all harddrives is an unsolicitated behaviour even with the prewarning.

    In my eyes WHS either should keep the drives intact until asked to do different with the selected system partition the only exception. But also here the setup program should offer a chance to keep the content of that system partition by doing an inplace backup, if the disk space on the same or another partition allows. A smooth integration of existing storage with it's data is a core request, which many customers will have. And Microsoft does not want any one customer loosing his data first to backup it later.

    Of course all depends from the availibility of WHS in the market as a separate box - in an OEM machine this could only start to be an problem in case of some broken disk and the need to reinstall.

    Best greetings from Germany

    Olaf Engelke
    MVP for Windows Server/Admin Frameworks

       

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    • Sunday, 25 February 2007 9:32 PM
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      Olaf, there's some discussion of basically this same issue here. You might want to go and join in there. There's also at least one suggestion on Connect, here.