One day when I was checking whether my WHS 2011 server had backed itself up, the Dashboard showed that it had been incomplete or unsuccessful over several of the past few days. The Event Viewer, indicated that the Hidden System Partition had a bad block "The device, \Device\Harddisk0\DR0, has a bad block". WinObj.exe from SysInternals confirmed the reference was to the Hidden System partition.
I ran Crystal Disk Info and confirmed the drive was in trouble, then installed the Home Server Smart Addin and it showed two more excessive counts in the SMART data for the boot hard disk. I tried a manual server backup and it suceeded but I needed to replace the boot drive.
The original 1TB boot disk had a hidden system partition [100MB], the WHS 2011 OS (C:) [60GB] and a data partition (D:). I had a spare 64GB SSD, so I thought I would manually backup the hidden and OS partitions and restore to the SSD. And then after the server booted, I would use the dashboard to restore the files to another disk. No dice. I tried to restore the system image to a 120GB and a 320 GB and got error message "The system image restore failed. Error details: The parameter is incorrect. 0x80070057"
For server restore to work the disk count and partition count must match and the destination disk must be the same size or larger than the original.
Since the USB used to boot the installation/restore media increases the disk count, you have to pull it out before the before recovery software scans the system looking for a system image backup. No need to reboot, just press <back> a few times and then pul the USB stick out.
Ok the boot USB was pulled and no longer shows in the "Exclude List". Same error 0x80070057 when trying to restore to the SSD and the 320GB disk.
So I replaced the failed drive with a brand new 1TB drive, started recovery, pulled the boot USB and it worked perfectly restoring the hidden system partition, WHS 2011 OS and the data partition.
So if the system disk fails and you simply replace it with same or larger, the restore process works just fine.
But how to get the OS onto the 64GB drive? The 100MB and 60GB OS partitions amount to 60.1 GB but a 64GB drive is actually 64*(10^9/2^30) = 59.6 GB so there would not be room for the existing OS on the SSD.
I used BootIt Bare Metal by Terabyte Unlimited which need not be installed and can boot from a USB stick to delete the data partition then shrink the OS partition from 60GB to 56 GB. I then used BootIt BM to image the entire disk and restore the image to the SSD. Then I used BootIt BM to resize the OS to maximum size on the SSD. Final size was 59.5 GB. All of this in a single boot of the BIBM USB stick.
I then booted the SSD to make sure it worked and restored the data that was on the old D: drive, from WHS 2011 server backup, to a new location in the existing server folders (where I had spare space) using the WHS Dashboard.
There are several free partition management and imaging programs around but I have used BIBM for many years and it is reliable, can handle any situation, is well supported and inexpensive. It also multi-boots.
The server is now operating fine on the SSD and I returned the temparary 1000 GB disk to spare stock. Since the OS disk is now physically separate from the data, system restore should be a lot simpler in the future. I can simply replace the failed drive with any disk 64GB or larger, boot the installation media and restore. And yes WHS 2011 seems to respond a bit faster to the keyboard but most operations are disk bound the speed increase is not striking.
These links provide the insight I needed to get server restore working:
and the very valuable WGS post: