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Remove a drive wizard, what to expect?

问题 Remove a drive wizard, what to expect?

  • Wednesday, April 11, 2007 8:23 PM
     
     
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    Hi,

     

    Several threads on this forum have made me worry about the intended removal of a drive from a WHS server (6.0.1301.0). I need to take out one drive in order to be able to build up a new machine with a newer version of WHS.

     

    As said, people seem to have very different experiences when removing a drive. From complete success to massive data loss. The data i've got is simply to valuable to risk loosing, therefore i'd like to take a proven approach to taking out one of the drives.

     

    Now the removal wizard tels me a should make sure i have enough free space. How am I supposed to figure that out? The drive i intent to remove is 190GB. The WHS console reports that I have 165GB free space throughout all drives. How can i determine how much of the 190GB is actualy in use, as the wizard tells me to? (If you can't, maybee the text in the UI of the drive removal wizard should be changed to make more sense, it now asks me to confirm something i think i can't.)

     

    Could anyone from the WHS team comment on this please?

     

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  • Wednesday, April 11, 2007 9:46 PM
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    If the drive to be removed is 190 GB, and there is only 160 GB of free space throughout all the drives in your WHS, then you likely don't have enough space to remove the drive. The console interface unfortunately doesn't allow you to determine what data is stored where.

    The issue with removing drives is that, in this build, when you tell WHS through the console to remove a drive, it should rearrange all the files on all the drives to get everything off the target drive. However, it doesn't do so correctly, and as a result, any files that are on that drive, and not in shares marked for duplication, are lost to WHS when the drive is removed. The files are still on the drive, however, and can be recovered by connecting the drive to another PC and copying them off.

    In your case, I would copy enough data off of WHS to your client PC to let you free up some additional space. I would make sure that all folders were marked for duplication and that duplication had finished. That takes "a long time", and I don't know of any reliable way to tell that it's done right now. There's apparently an internal tool that will let you do that, but it's not available to the beta group. Anyway, once duplication finishes, I would use the wizard to remove the drive, then wait for it to tell me it's safe to disconnect.

    Please let us know if you have any additional questions, or if anything above isn't clear.
     
  • Thursday, April 12, 2007 11:01 AM
     
     
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    I actually just did this earlier this week...  I had 2 80G and a 200G drives in my WHS, but purchased a 250G to put in there.  I only have 2 PATA interfaces, so I decided to pull on of the 80's and replace it with the 250.

     

    If you get into disk manager, it will show the percentage used as well as the freespace on each drive.  I first checked that between the 80G OS disk and the 200G disk, I had the free space of what was used on the 80G (which was most of it).  When you run the removal wizard, it first computes if you have enough freespace to move the data off that drive _before_ it moves any data.  After it comes back and says you have enough space, it let's you choose to move the data off that drive.  Both processes take quite a bit of time (and that was just on an 80G (full), so the 160 may take forever...  I did continue to watch disk manager during the move process and did see that it was increasing the free space on the 80G and decreasing the free space on the 200G.

     

    I did not expierence any data loss from the changeover, but it could be luck I guess...  Just make sure to connect the drive in another machine after you remove it to make sure there isn't any data left on it...