Repartition a hard drive on the server

You cannot back up a hard drive that is larger than 2 TB. You must partition the hard disk into drives that are 2 TB or less, and then add the new hard drives that you create to server storage.

When an unformatted internal hard disk is detected on the Windows Home Server 2011, a health alert is raised that contains a link to the Add a New Hard Disk wizard. The Add a New Hard Disk wizard walks you through the formatting of the hard disk. When the wizard is finished, one or more, depending on the size of the disk, logical hard drives formatted will be created on the hard disk and formatted as NTFS. If the size of the hard disk is less than 2TB, only one logical drive is created. If it is larger than 2TB, multiple logical drives are created. The logical hard drive size is kept under 2TB to ensure that the server can be backed up using the Server Backup feature.

If the hard drive is already partitioned and formatted into one or more partitions that are larger than 2 TB, you do not receive the alert that an unformatted hard disk generates. Instead, you received the message that a hard drive is too large to be backed up. You must repartition the hard drive into partitions that are 2 TB or less using Disk Management.

To repartition a hard disk drive

  1. On the server, click Start, click Administrative Tools, and then click Server Manager.

  2. In Server Manager, click Storage, and then click Disk Management.

  3. Right-click the large drive, click Delete Volume, and then click Yes.

    Note

    Repeat this step for each partition on the hard disk drive.

  4. Right-click the Unallocated hard disk drive, and then click New Simple Volume.

  5. In the New Simple Volume Wizard, create and format a volume that is 2 TB (2,000,000 MB) or less.

    Note

    Repeat this step until all unallocated space on the hard disk drive is used.