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Clean WHS install - Can I get my DATA only on secondary drives? RRS feed

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    Hi All,

    I'm a new poster to this forum but I'm by no means a newb to WHS or Windows Server technologies.

    After much deliberation, I am migrating my home Linux system to WHS, however, I do have a question that I have been unable to find an answer for:

    I want to install WHS on my system using 1x 500GB & 3x 1.5TB drives, which I now have ready to go right here next to me but I want to use the single 500GB as the boot drive.

    The thing is, I want me boot drive to not contain ANY of the DE 'DATA', purely for recovery purposes.

    Does anyone know if this is possible and if there is already a way that I can do this?

    I'm ready to start my install but I would like to find out how to do this first before I begin.

    Thanks all for any help.

    Wednesday, April 14, 2010 10:58 AM

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    No, it is not possible to control what drives Windows Home Server puts copies of your data on. In general, if you have plenty of free space you won't have much other than "tombstones" on D:. It really won't matter, however. If you turn on duplication for a share, the data for that share will be stored on two physical drives, and if you don't, you're already accepting that the loss of a single drive could mean the loss of some files. The system drive isn't special in that regard.

    Also, you can't control the size of the system partition (it will be 20 GB), and the system drive will be split between that and D:.

    I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)
    Wednesday, April 14, 2010 11:50 AM
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    Hi Ken, thanks for the response.

    So WHS system partition is also locked at 20GB? Is there any way to resize this after I finish the install?

    I'm a little concerned about recovery, as I always have, and I've resigned myself to accept the decommissioning of my Linux RAID 5 in favor of WHS's Drive Extender.

    Wednesday, April 14, 2010 1:12 PM
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    Hi,

    Recovery is a straightforward process as the OS is deemed as sacrificial.  That is if you have duplication turned on the failure of one drive can be easily recovered from by replacing the physical drive.  If that drive is the system drive then one simple performs a 'Server Recovery' using the installation media or from the OEM a Recovery DVD/CD.  Granted in most cases it is necessary to run Windows Update a number of times before the system will be back to the current PowerPack and Patch level but this process requires very little knowledge and is easy to perform though time consuming.

    20GB is ample for the System Partition.  Most installations never exceed 10GB of space on the System Partition in normal use.  Personally I dislike RAID5 as I've experienced a second failure when rebuilding an array more often than I like to recall.  The other nice thing about drive extender is you can mount a single drive in another windows system and read the data from the drive.

    Cheers,
    Al

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    Wednesday, April 14, 2010 4:24 PM