My server:
Acer easyStore H341 (approx 2 yrs old)
Windows Home Server v1 with PP3
StableBit Scanner add-in installed
3 x 2TB Seagate Barracuda LP ST32000542AS (Data Drives)
1TB Western Digital WD10EADS-00M (System Drive)
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Problem:
After having increasing problems with the H341 becoming unresponsive, and having it give an occasional pop-up balloon on my desktop stating there was an issue with a hard drive (only to open the WHS Console which reported all drive were healthy), I did some homework and came upon this site which alerted me to the StableBit Scanner add-in which I purchased and installed. It is telling me that TWO of the three Seagate Barracuda LP ST32000542AS drives have bad sectors. I did see on the threads about 2TB drives that these drives are known to work with WHS v1, so I am chalking up the failures to a bad run of drives.
The problem now is this: when I go to remove either of the damaged drives from the pool, it starts by telling me that it can safely move off all the data, but then after the "This may take several hours" removal process runs for, yes, several hours, it returns an error saying the drive can not be removed due to file conflicts, with the details showing "The request could not be performed because of an I/0 device error" on one or two files D:\folders\{GUID}\whatever.dat. Now, I get that this is how the DE technology stores data across multiple drives, but this tells me nothing about what to do with this info. The Help is not particularly helpful here. Bottom line, I am stuck not being able to remove the damaged drives from the pool.
I have copied all the data off the server, so at this point I am not concerned with losing any data. I just want to replace the two bad drives and get this thing back to working order again. I just don't know what I need to do. From what I've read here, reinstalling the system drive sounds like a major PITA, and I also get the impression that if I simply shut the server down, yank out the bad drives and replace them without officially "Removing" them, that bad things will happen.
So any advice on how to proceed would be greatly appreciated. Also, I have one additional ST32000542AS drive that I bought as a replacement at the time I bought the server, but now that I need 2 drives, and since they don't make that drive anymore, any advice on a good currently available 2TB replacement drive for WHS v1 would be welcome as well.