WSH has given me several notifications that make me (and others) think it's System drive is on the way out.
Currently all drives are "Healthy", but that's bco a recent Repair of the system drive.
This afternoon, I bought a new drive and told WHS to "Remove" one of it's data drives.
My plan is to replace the "Removed" data drive with the new drive and then re-install WHS on the "Removed" drive.
The "Removed" (more correctly "to be Removed") drive in question is a 1-TB SATA drive about 34% full.
The "Remove" process started over an hour and a half ago, but the progress meter had not budged.
I closed the WHS console window, figuring maybe it was not getting re-drawn.
Now I am unable to open it again and most (not all) of my WHS shares are not available.
The box is still running and I can Remote Desktop to it - and when I try to open a Console there I get "The Windows Home Server Computer Backup Service is not running...... Please restart Windows Home Server...."
FWIW, I checked Computer Management | Manage | Services and Applications | Services and, except for "Windows Home Server Computer Backup" all "Windows Home Server..." services showed as "Started".
Reading other threads, I get the impression that the drive removal process can take a long time... maybe even a *very* long time... as in days.
That depends. If all of your hardware is functioning properly, it should only take a few hours. However, not all of your hardware is functioning properly.
I was planning on getting some work done tonite.
Have I shot myself in the foot on this one?
It's possible. By removing that drive from the storage pool, you might now be forcing WHS to move the data from a functioning drive (the one you are trying to remove now) to a failing drive (the primary drive). (It depends on how much free space you had in the storage pool when you started the removal process.) If that is in fact what is happening, it might take days (or it may never finish). Also, by doing that, you might now be taking unnecessary additional risks with your data (forcing it onto a failing hard drive). You should have just replaced the primary drive with the new drive and done a Server Reinstallation.
