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Using True Image with Windows Home Server (WHS)

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Can True Image or any Acronis product create a clone of a WHS boot disk. I would like to migrate my server disk to a higher speed and more relaible drive. If I had done this right out of the box I would have had no problem, just replace the disk and do a fresh reinstall of the softwear. However, now I have many GB of data on it and I just got all the bugs worked out for my media streaming...

Does anyone know if I can remove my drive from my WHS and clone it to a new/larger drive? Will it work just like replacing a Vista or XP hard Drive?

There are other uses with WHS I would like to explore such as full server backups among others. Does anybody in the forum use True Image with WHS?

Regards,

John

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John:

Normally you can't use imaging software with Windows Home Server (WHS). Due to its use of Drive Extender (DE) technology, it's not as simple as imaging a partition and restoring it since DE stores file tombstones on the primary data partition, and if you don't get them all restored properly you can run into problems. WHS has a recommended procedure for replacing a drive that you can find here on its forum.

The recommended procedure is to remove the primary disk, install a new disk in its place and do a Server Reinstall. This type of install is supposed to be nondestructive to your data but you will then need to reinstall any additional programs that you installed to the primary OS partition and re-add your users.

However, (and I caution you that I've not tried this personally), I'll bet that you could use TI to restore an image of your primary disk if you are very careful and only if replacing the disk with one of the same size. You would need to shut down your server, boot it from the TI recovery CD and create an image of both the OS and the data partition on the primary disk. It's absolutely essential that you capture an image of both partitions and restore it before starting up the server again. After saving the image shut down, remove the primary disk and install the new disk in its place. Reboot from the TI recovery CD and restore both partitions, then reboot.

If you want to replace the primary disk with a larger one then this probably won't work. Others who have tried it and posted on the WHS forum report that the different data partition size causes various problems and error messages. But the Server Reinstall method should work.

Perhaps you could ask for help with this on the WHS forum. Although I really like WHS, the difficulty of using imaging software to restore the primary disk is one of its weaknesses. I spent hours installing and configuring Cygwin and remote access on my server and would not want to have to do all of it again if the disk fails.