A little help with WHS...

[Jesse]

Hello,

I am having a some trouble with my home built whs machine. The os is installed on a pair of WD RE3 drives in raid 1. There are several other drives in the machine for storage. When I first set the machine up I had a 500 gb sata drive that was giving me some trouble setting up, and while monkeying around with it I made the mistake of setting it as the active partition. There was some data on this drive I wanted to hang onto for a short time, so I decided not to add it to the pool just yet. At this point everything was working just fine.

Fast forward a couple of months. I want to remove this drive and install a 1 tb drive which I will add to the pool. Since the existing 500 gb drive is not part of the pool, I just shut the machine down and removed it and installed the 1 tb drive. The machine took about 4 minutes to boot, wanted to send 5 or 6 error reports to MS and the whs control panel showed that all drives other than the os drive were failing. In the right pane of the control panel I got the "calculating space" message for several minutes before I shut it down and plugged the original 500 gb drive back in. It then booted up fine with all drives showing green in the control panel.

Am I right in guessing that setting a partition as active on a storage drive is the root of this? Either way, any help would be very much appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Jesse

[PLUCKYHD]

First you shouldn't get error messages when adding a new drive you should just see a message asking if you want to add it to the pool or not

Also why are you running raid ok a whs? For this to work you should have the raid invisible to whs

You should be adding the drive in the whs console not disk management

[Jesse]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply.

The error message had nothing to do with adding a drive. The message was because attempting to boot without the 500gb drive that contains the active partition apparently caused whs to hang while booting. The message was something along the lines of "windows had to stop un-expectedly and has recovered." The message appeared 5 or 6 times for just one boot of the machine.

I am using raid 1 for the os drive(s) so that a single drive failure cannot bring down the server. I understand that it is not officially supported, but it does work just fine.

I was in disk management because when I first built the machine the os could not even see the drive. The os will, of course, need to see the drive before the whs console will see it.

I have noticed that the drive with the active partition has what looks like duplicates of all the files that whs keeps in the C:\fs directory. Could this be part of the problem?

Any ideas what I can do to fix this?

TIA

Jesse

[PLUCKYHD]

Why not delete the partition and in another machine or using a bootable utility disk then restart WHS

[Jesse]

Hi,

I have considered it. I have also considered just adding it to the pool. As long as that drive is in the system everything works, so it seems risky to blow away whatever is on that drive before I get this sorted.

I did find some info on whs perpetually "calculating sizes." The long and short of it was a missing file or a permissions issue. Maybe I will pull the drive and try checking the log files once it boots. If it is a missing file issue maybe I can move it from the drive in question to the C drive?

Thanks again.

Jesse