I was just reading the literature on PP1 and noticed that the hard drive removal wizard may fail if there is a file that is open or in use. This may be the cause of your problems. Maybe re-boot the server to free up any locks on files. Maybe an add-in is using a file? I believe that if the wizard cannot remove the file, the file will still be on the drive. This way you could remove it from the WHS box and attach it to a normal PC and determine which files are not being removed. Also PP1 is suspose to identify which files it had problems with.

Another thing to consider, and maybe someone else has the answer, when you remove a drive forceably, WHS describes the drive as MISSING. Has anyone tried to move a drive from external to internal without using the wizard? It may be that WHS identifies it as missing, then realizes that it is back with no data loss. Obviously this is something for a test environment.

After re-reading your post, I'm assuming that you want to replace the external drives with different internal drives, so my scenario won't work, but it would be interesting to test.

About Ken's email: I've had the same thing with the internal drives. Using Sam's WHS Disk Management, I was not only able to successful remove the drives, I also saw that the drive was actually empty prior to removing it with WHS Disk Management.

I love your site, and look foward to your new podcasts. And I am very active in the community, and love what you are doing.

ken wrote:

Congratulations on your very interesting show.

I have a nagging issue that I hope you can help with: I've built a WHS with 3TB of HD capaciity, including three external hard drives. As I upgrade the internal HDs I intend to remove the external ones. That's my problem – I follow the "remove hard drive" process and the takes the time to work through the removal process and always ends up with the error message that the removal was not successful. Same issue no matter what external drive I try to remove.

Any thoughts?

Keep up the good work…

Michael wrote:

Hey, love the podcast, keep up the good work. Oh, and fix your levels (but I know you already know that)

I have a unique situation that may start some discussions. The basic theory with a home built machine is that the largest drive should be the base drive for the OS. I think this should be changed to the largest collection of files you want to transfer should be the base drive. The reason for this is that with multiple drives (especially more than just 2 or 3), the DE tries to keep the base drive free of actual storage, and only keeps the "tombstones". With this in mind, if you had the following drives: 2x200gb, 1x250gb, 1x500gb and 1x1tb, I would recommend using either the 250 or the 500 as the base drive, not the 1tb.

In my box, I have 8×200, 1×250 (base), 1×500, and 2×750. With this many drives, I've found some deeper workings of DE. It appears that DE tries not to completely fill a drive, it likes to keep about 15-20 gb free on each drive.

Once that limit is reached on the storage drives, it starts to store data on the base drive, which would constantly reduce the amount you could transfer at any one time.

Wonder if anyone else has had similar experiences?

This is just my experience in having a home built WHS, with a lot of drives.