Reinstallation of WHS 2011 - What happens to DrivePool data?

hooj

Hello.

I have to reinstall my WHS 2011 system due to unrepairable file corruption on the system drive.
My setup is as follows:

WHS is running as a VM on ESXi 5 with a 1.5 TB virtual disk assigned to WHS as the C: and partitions. I also have 5 other 1 TB disks assigned to WHS and these are part of the DrivePool. is also part of the DrivePool.

I do not have a backup of WHS, so restoring is not an option.

My plan is to create another VM running WHS 2011 and DrivePool installed on a fresh 160GB virtual disk.
If I then also assign the old WHS 2011 virtual disk to this server and remove the C: partition would DrivePool detect that the partition was part of an old DrivePool installation? What happens to the shares that were created on the old pool? Would I need to recreate these? Can I then just add the remainder of the disks back into the pool without any data loss?

Thanks in advance.

eda

hooj,

I actually went through a similar process, however, I am not running a VM.  I'm running WHS 2011 natively.  I did a complete rebuild without losing any data.  See the post in this forum called "How to recreate a pool" for a description of my experience with it.

Shane

Eda's description can be found here: http://forum.covecube.com/discussion/comment/1229#Comment_1229

I would however change the order slightly in this situation:

0. If the virtual disk container file is itself corrupted (I'm not clear on this from the description), removing its C: partition may risk hosing the partition also. Can you backup the vdisk first?

1. Install WHS 2011 on the new vdisk.

2. Assign the old vdisk to the new server. If you can ensure the VM will only boot from the new system partition, leave the old system partition alone for now, otherwise remove the old system partition and hope it goes quietly (see #0).

3. Make sure the VM can see the other five disks that were part of the pool.

4. Install DrivePool and reboot.

5. The pool drives should be found and marked as unhealthy; validate them.

6. If you want to stop using the old vdisk, and have enough free space on the five 1TB drives to accommodate the old partition's contents, remove the old partition from within DrivePool and its pooled files will be automatically migrated to the other disks in the pool (remembering that the old partition will now have a different drive letter assigned to it, and that non-pooled files on the old partition will not be migrated).

If you have any other questions, please feel free to ask!