The blogosphere has been highly indignant about the removal of drive extender (DE) from Windows Home Server (WHS) 2011. Most WHS users seem to have known “good DE”, but I’ve meet “bad DE”; and it makes me want to see the back of it.

The saga started when I noticed backups failing. I rose above this for a couple of weeks but then decided it was time to sort it out. Messages from the WHS console were almost useless, but there was a cryptic error message which could be followed up. Someone, somewhere, suggested I install Home Server SMART, and was told that one of the 1TB drives was failing (12 months old, give me a break!). Another post suggested a chkdsk batch file might sort it. I ran this batch file, and 8 hours later, learnt it didn’t. The drive was a goner.

With DE, the theory is simple, remove the dying drive, pop in a new one and away you go. By some stroke of luck, the dying drive wasn’t the system drive, so this plan of attack seemed reasonable. I thought a Sunday afternoon should do it.

Now when you remove a drive, WHS warns you this could take “hours”. Hours is an annoying expression in the IT universe. Seconds are great, minutes are OK, days are “don’t bother”, but hours are, well, “this is do-able with patience”. The progress  bar was as uninformative as they usually are, and after “hours” was told that drive removal failed because of a cyclic redundancy check problem. Technet suggested to run chkdsk (been there, done that), so I just deleted the culprit files that  were identifiable. I also repaired the backups (some more hours), then tried to use WHS remove the hard disk wizard again.

This multi-hour task failed yet again, with a similar message as before. The backup database had somehow got corrupted. I fired up a command prompt, stopped a few services, and then used del * to scrub the backups folder (which was very satisfying in a strange way), then ran the Remove Hard Drive Wizard yet again, waited another 6 hours and finally it actually worked. Hallelujah!

A new 1TB drive was bought for $68 (which bought back very fond memories of the 40MB drive I once paid $700 for), pulled out the old drive, installed the new one and we are back to square one (minus the backups, and many valuable hours of my life).

Is the average “home user” was supposed to do all this? I reckon they’d run a mile.

Now call me old fashioned, but if DE wasn’t a part of this scenario, the whole thing would have been simpler and faster. I’d just move the files myself using the multitude of options available in Windows. I recognise there are dramas moving corrupted files, but at least the problem could have been isolated and “conquered by division”. The now-hated Remove Hard Drive Wizard would have been nowhere to be seen. Moving GBs of files will take hours, but these hours should only be wasted once.

I thought DE was a good idea until it crossed me. Ultimately I want to stay in control of which physical or logical partition files are created, copied or moved to. Bring on WHS 2011 and good riddance to the removal to DE.

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