WHS: The Big Install (Part 3)

After my earlier entry WHS: The Big Install (Part 1) I received a comment from tolonensan noting that they solved a similar problem to mine, namely that my 1TB SATA 300 drive was not being recognised by my nForce2 motherboard. T

olonensan wrote that by setting a jumper on their drive they were able to force it to SATA150. I figured this would be worth a go and set about finding a document that would show which of the jumpers on the back of my drive would allow me to do this, since the label on the drive contained no information.

As it turns out the changes for a Samsung F1 1TB drive is set via a utility called ESTools (downloadable from the Samsung web site), which is both a step forward and a step back. I can see it makes some sense to add this functionality in with the general tool set, however it does rely on you having a machine available that can read the unaltered disc in order to make the changes. Fortunately this was not a problem for me, however some people may not be so fortunate (although I suspect these people also wouldn't know the difference between a SATA 150 and 300 drive anyway). So a catch 22 that could have been avoided by jumpers, but then these bring their own problems too.

Anyway, after making the change on my desktop PC I plugged the drive back into the WHS shuttle box and it was instantly recognised. Unfortunately there wasn't enough physical space for this drive in the machine alongside the others, so I merely added it to the array, then removed the old low capacity SATA drive from the array and waited about half an hour for the data to be moved from the old drive and re-balanced on the new configuration.

It was then just a simple case of unplugging the old drive and powering the machine back on and waiting for the moment of truth... and... it worked flawlessly.

So the machine is now in the configuration I first intended, well almost. I wanted:

• Primary (OS) Drive: SATA 1Tb (An old SATA 300 Samsung F1 from my desktop machine)
• Additional Drive: PATA 500Gb (The data drive from the old Ubuntu Box)
• Additional Drive: PATA 300Gb (The system drive from the old Ubuntu Box) 

What I've actually got is:

• Primary (OS) Drive: PATA 500Gb (The data drive from the old Ubuntu Box)
• Additional Drive: PATA 300Gb (The system drive from the old Ubuntu Box)
• Additional Drive: SATA 1Tb (An old SATA 300 Samsung F1 from my desktop machine)

which I'm perfectly happy with. Should I need more space I can either add a USB external drive (or possibly FireWire?) or simply replace the 300Gb PATA drive with a larger SATA drive by following the same process as removing to other SATA drive. I have no idea how difficult it is to remove the drive with the OS on it, but I imagine this is a no-no. It doesn't really matter as by the time that happens either the next version of WHS will be out and I'll have re-installed anyway, and.or more likely I'll be running on other hardware.

And the old SATA 150 drive? Well that's gone into my desktop machine as a scratch drive, but to be honest I'm not really using it at the moment. The grand plan is to have it as a local backup to replace the external 300Gb USB drive I currently have attached, and have one less power drain in the house. I would copy the data from this onto the WHS, but even with duplication I'm a little nervous about this, and as I've discovered to my cost with the Ubuntu box: You may call it a back-up copy on a back-up device, but if that device contains the only copy of your data then it's actually the primary and only copy and it's not backed up at all.

I also took the chance a week ago to take the graphics card out of my WHS box, so it is effectively running headless and hopefully saving about 10W (it's an old card). This didn't worry the installation at all (my trial installation restarted 3 times before it settled down) and a single re-boot had the machine back on the network and running fine.

What has stumped me (and I wonder if this is connected) is that I also updated the LightsOut plugin at about the same time, and this no longer wakes from sleep mode. I didn't change any BIOS settings, but to check I need to plug the graphics card back in and look at the BIOS settings, which isn't ideal.

If, and it's a long shot, LightsOut requires the graphics card to work properly (and I've no idea why it should), then it will be staying in as it's a good add-on, and will likely save me more than the 10W drop in power when the machine is on.

Although if anyone has any ideas what settings I should be using...