Clone WHS primary drive

[krypto]

Has anyone successfully cloned the primary drive (c: sys and d: data) on a WHS. I found lots of discussion on doing this but no definitive ways of successfully doing it.

I you have managed to get this to work could you please explain the process.

[GlenR]

I doubt you can clone the d:data partition as WHS uses a proprietory format for the data areas. As far as I know the system partition is NTFS, so it should be clone-able.

The thing is, if you change your primary drive and re-image the 20GB sytem partiution, the d:data partition will still be useless as it isn't part of the "pool". I don't think it can be added like another drive as the primary drive's data partition is a bit special holding all the "tombstones" as it does. I have the feeling that the only way to get this operational is during an install or reinstall of WHS - not a clone.

[vlad]

Acronis can do it with Clone Disk utility.
I have successfully cloned HDD and replaced it with the bigger one.
It had 2 NTFS partitions.

[krypto]

Vlad, which version of Acronis did you use? I think the different versions have different drivers. It failed when I ran under native IDE, which I need to set for most utilities to run. It worked when running as AHCI. Go figure?

I found the following system for replacing the primary drive with(c: sys and d: data):
- no loss of backups
- no loss of data
- no rebuild/reinstall
- no stuffing around
- takes under 30 mins

On my system it worked on SATA drives running AHCI. Also my primary data drive was practically empty.

This won't work if your primary drive has failed as you need to image it. I'm also not sure if would work restoring an old image if data/drives have changed.

Steps
1. Create a Acronis recovery disk.
2. Disconnect all data drives
3. Leave the primary drive with c: sys and d: data connected.
4. Connect your replacement drive, I used the next sata port
5. Boot from the recovery disk
6. Clone disk - make sure to leave the sys partition as 20GB. I went from a 250GB to 500GB and used custom resize to allocate the remainder of the disk to d:
7. Remove the old disk and connect the new disk to the same sata port
8. Reboot with only sys attached. I did this to check that it worked and got a minor error message
9. Shutdown
10. Reattach all other data drives
11. Reboot
12. Finished

[vlad]

http://www.acronis.com.au/homecomput...s/migrateeasy/
It is included in v.11 of True Image Home.

[Quazza]

Howdy,

Just wanted to let you all know that I have performed a system drive replace using Acronis V11 boot disc and it worked perfectly.

I used the steps advised with no hiccups at all, So I now have replaced the existing 80 gb system drive with a 400 gb and all seems to be working fine.

I think I will also make an image of the system drive until MS sorts out the backup of the system drive to an external HD

Cheers and thanks for the info.

Quazza

[krypto]

WARNING!!!!!!

After keeping my old WHS system disk for a while as a backup, I decided to add it to my storage pool.

I assumed that WHS wouldn't look at it until I tell WHS to add it. Wrong!. Booting with the old Sys disk caused things to go haywire and caused some minor corruption to WHS from which it recovered after two reboots.

In short if you are going to add your old sys disk to your storage pool, make sure you format it first