WHS Sage Server reinstall

[wayner]

I may have to do an OS reinstall on my Sage server which is running WHS.

What is the exact process for doing a server reinstall so that it maintains your data drives? Do you keep all of the drives plugged in when doing the OS reinstall? I thought that WHS wants to reformat all hard drives at installation? I currently have an OS drive and 6 data drives. I did this about 4-5 months ago and was never able to reinstall - I had to manually copy the files from the old data drives which was a severe pain since I have about 5 TB of files (although much of it is duplicated).

[KarylFStein]

I did this not too long ago. All you need to do is boot from the WHS install DVD and when you are asked what installation type to do, select "Server Reinstall". Your pool data will remain untouched and your shared drives will be automatically created.

I did read on a forum that some people were not able to select the "Server Reinstall" option. What they had to do it pull out all the pool drives, do a full install on the OS drive, shut down and plug in the pool drives, then boot again from the WHS DVD. This time "Server Reinstall" showed up as a selectable option.

Be sure you have a backup of all the data you can't recreate just in case!

[wayner]

Thanks Karyl - but what if you are concerned that your system drive is failing? I would like to replace the system drive - does that mean that I can no longer do the reinstall?

[Skirge01]

Originally Posted by wayner

Thanks Karyl - but what if you are concerned that your system drive is failing? I would like to replace the system drive - does that mean that I can no longer do the reinstall?

That's exactly what he described. You can reinstall to the same OS drive or a new one.

[KarylFStein]

Yes, sorry, I did the "server reinstall" described above on a totally blank/formatted/unpartitioned drive to see what would happen if I lost it.

Make sure you have all your user and add-in configurations noted as those do not get restored.

You may want to use WHSBDBB to take a snapshot of the client backups and restore later. I am not sure if that will add the clients connrctions back, or if you still need to re-install the connector on each client...hmmm

You may want to make a copy of C:\Program Files to the pool to save any configuration files you have on there for easier restore. At the very least if you're not already backing up the wiz.bin and stuff to the pool, do that!

[wayner]

Thanks folks - it wasn't clear to me from Karyl's first post whether a reinstall was being done onto the same hard drive or a new drive.

I will definitely backup my Progam Files folder. I have a process that backs up my entire Sage folder every night currently. And since my old system drive is still ok but I just suspect it is causing issues, I will keep that drive around so I can throw that into an external hard drive case and get files from it if I have to.