Removing a Drive from your Windows Home Server

There seems to be a lot of people who are still a little unsure about adding or removing drives on their Windows Home Servers, so I figured some simple walk-throughs would help here.

In this first walk-through, I will discuss removing a hard drive from the storage pool.

REMOVING A DRIVE FROM THE STORAGE POOL

A time may come when you want to remove a hard drive from your Windows Home Server,
either because you suspect that there might be a problem with it or because you want to
replace it with a larger and possibly faster hard drive.

You cannot remove the primary hard drive, which is the one with the Windows Home Server program files stored on it. If you want to replace the primary hard drive, you will need to reinstall Windows Home Server.

To remove a hard drive, just perform the following simple steps:

1. In the Windows Home Server Console, click the Server Storage tab.

2. Click the hard drive that you want to remove, and then click the Remove button above
the list, or right-click the hard drive and select Remove from the context menu.

This will launch the Remove a Hard Drive Wizard.

Beware, because the removal process moves the files that are stored on that hard drive to another
hard drive, you must ensure that you have sufficient space available in the storage pool before continuing. Otherwise, you may lose files or some shared folder duplication may stop.

3. Click Next. The wizard will check that there is enough storage available to move the
files to before continuing.

Depending on how many hard drives you have in your server storage pool and how much data is stored within the pool, the process of calculating the available space could take a few minutes. As usual, be patient!

4. Once the calculation has completed, you will be presented with a Hard Drive
Removal Consequences page. Review this information as it could be very important.
There are two major areas of possible consequence, plus a reminder if you’re removing
an external drive.

• Files and Folders is where you will be informed if files that are stored in duplicated
folders will continue to be duplicated.

• Computer Backups is where you will be informed if any computer backups will
be lost.

• Do Not Disconnect will appear if the drive being removed is an external hard drive.
The wizard is reminding you that this drive must be connected and powered on
until the wizard has completed.

It is also possible that you won’t have any consequences (wouldn’t that be nice), in which case you will will just be told you can remove the drive.

If you have only two hard drives in your Windows Home Server and decide to remove
one of them, the biggest consequence is that shared folder replication cannot continue, because a minimum of two hard drives are required for replication. You will be warned of this on the Hard Drive Removal Consequences screen.

5. Click Finish. The hard drive is removed from the server storage pool, and the data is
moved to other hard drives within the pool. You can monitor the progress while this is
taking place.

Depending on how much data needs to be moved from the hard drive, the removal process can
take a long time. The wizard even advises that this process could take several hours to complete. Do I need to say that you should be patient?

6. Once the removal process has completed, you will be presented with a Hard Drive
Successfully Removed screen. Click Done to complete the removal process.

If the hard drive is an external hard drive, you can now safely unplug it from the
Windows Home Server. If the hard drive is an internal hard drive, you will need to power
off your Windows Home Server and remove the hard drive before restarting the Windows
Home Server.