Further to my previous post, I took receipt of four 2 terabyte drives and two 2 gigabyte memory sticks on Thursday 28th July, then the server arrived on Friday 29th. Needless to say I rushed home and started to put the new machine together.
First things first, I unpacked the server, plugged in the relevant leads and powered up to ensure everything was working correctly (or at least appeared to be), and took a note of the BIOS revision number. I then went onto the HP web site, downloaded the latest BIOS, run the executable to create the update files on a USB stick, and proceeded to update the server BIOS. All good.
Next step was to replace the memory and hard drives with my larger capacity components. All good. I jumped into the BIOS, changed the drive type to RAID, then entered the RAID set-up, and created two logical arrays of two striped drives. Splendid!
Now I was ready to install Windows Home Server 2011 itself. My USB stick with the files on refused to boot, so I grabbed my external USB DVD drive and fired things off... and the install went smoothly, recognising my two 4TB logical disks and installing to the first without issue.......... right up until the closing stages. Arses!
No matter what I tried the installer kept throwing a problem accessing the X: drive.
I used the Microsoft tool to create Windows 7 bootable USB key, but even attempting to install this way failed with the same error.
A search on the internet revealed people had found solutions to this issue blaming things such as broken hard drives, damaged media, and interestingly a timing issue using external drives. I hadn't even bothered installing an internal optical drive, I've got spares but they were all IDE, the new machine only supports SATA. Still, it was worth a punt so a trip to PC World resulted with me returning with a Blu-Ray writer (another £80, but at least it would be useful as I didn't already have one).
So with Blu-Ray drive attached I tried again.... with the same results. I know other people had got this running, but apparently not me (I subsequently wonder if the others that have done this were using stripes of 2 terabytes or less, an issue for WHS2011, apparently it can't handle partitons larger than this and mine were twice the maximum size).
That left only one thing to do, delete the RAID array and have the four drives visible individually (in my haste I forgot to consider having 2 drives mirrored, D'oh!) and use something like DriveBender of StableBit Disk Pool for duplication when they arrive. Not the end of the world.
So with the new drive configuration (and incidentally using the newly installed internal optical drive - well it was already in there) I started the install once again and... Success!!!!
I'm currently in the process of configuring, installing add-ins and copying over data, but so far I'm fairly impressed, especially with the remote access. One of my biggest issues is that the old WHS box takes so long to remote desktop into that by the time I attach it's shut itself down thinking it's the middle of the night and nobody is using it (a side effect of having Lights-Out running and incorrectly configured - unfortunately since I can't log in I don't get a chance to disable Lights-out!). I'll possibly just have to pull the drives out and attach them directly to the server to get to the data, awkward but hardly the end of the world.
The only other issue thus far is the fact that I removed the Blu-Ray drive... forgetting to eject the WHS 2011 install DVD. D'oh!
No doubt there will be another update soon.
