Great, so doing an in-place migration on existing hardware should present no problems via the following process:
1. Remove the largest existing drive from your drive pool or buy a new drive that is equal to or larger than the largest existing drive in your drive pool.
2. If the drive you added/demigrated if not larger than the largest remaining drive(s) in your server, perform a storage balance across your remaining drives using Drive Balancer - this should ensure that the used space on any of the drives is less than
the drive you freed up in step 1, talking into account the new system partition. If that is not the case (e.g., your server is nearly completely full), you will need to add a drive to your server so that you can copy your data over without running out
of space.
3. Power your server off and physically DISCONNECT/UNPLUG all the drives from your server except the one you added/demigrated in step 1.
4. Install WHS v2 on your server. This will wipe out all drives connected to the server, so make sure that the only drive visible is the empty one from step 1.
5. Re-create all of your share points from the old server.
6. Power the server down, and re-connect the other hard drives. These will appear as standard hard drives to the OS once it boots back up.
7. On each of those drives, you will find a hidden folder named "DE", and in that is a folder called "Shares". This contains the part of the drive pool shares from v1 that that drive held. Copy the contents of this folder
to the new storage pool folders, starting with your largest drive. As you empty the folder on a given drive, add the drive to the new storage pool so you have room to copy more drives over. Note that if you were using duplication, you will eventually
start getting "file exists - overwrite?" warnings; you can either allow or skip these - the files are the identical copies made by the duplication service on the old server, so it will save time to just skip them.
8. Once all of your drives are emptied and added to the new pool, your migration is complete.
Note that this is a *migration*, NOT an *upgrade*. If you were running applications on the old server, you will need to re-install them on the new one, and if they stored data outside the storage pool, any data files they may have created will be lost.
If your application has a documented backup process, use it before you migrate, and store your backups in your storage pool so you can recover it once you are moved over.
Lastly, use this method at your own risk; while it will work for most people, I take no responsibility of you lose data or damage your hardware using it. If you aren't clear about what you are doing here, build a new server and copy across the network
like MS suggests - you never lose data when copying it.
