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Is It Possible to Build A WHS and Then Attach a Drive With 3 Terrabytes of Existing Data RRS feed

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         I am currently running Windows 2008 Server, and I wanted to turn that machine into a WHS machine. I have my music, and my movies on two seperate external drives. I want to build my WHS using the internal drives of the server, then move my music and movies onto the WHS machine. I was wondering if this is possible?
    A.K. McNeil
    Thursday, October 21, 2010 9:41 PM

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    In the sense that you probably mean, i.e. connect a drive and have Windows Home Server manage the pre-existing data, no. Windows Home Server can only manage data in the shares you create using the server console application. Those shares exist on disks you've added to the server storage pool, and disks added to the storage pool are formatted as part of that process.

    You can connect a drive and manage the shares yourself, just as you're doing today. This is unsupported but not particularly difficult as long as you understand that the data on them is completely outside Windows Home Server.

    I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)
    Thursday, October 21, 2010 10:29 PM
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    How would I be abot to do that? Once I move the data off the drive, then I can easily add that drive to the storage pool. My problem is that right now, I dont have enough storage on one drive to move the data, but all my drives combined in the storage pool could easily handle this.

    A.K. McNeil
    Saturday, October 23, 2010 4:41 AM
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    Then you'll need to buy more storage.

    However, you should be aware that Windows Home Server doesn't use GPT disks, so when you add a large disk (> 2 TB) to your server, it will format it as an MBR disk, which will use only the first 2 TB of space on the disk.

    I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)
    Saturday, October 23, 2010 1:40 PM
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