The Hewlett Packard LX195 comes with a 640GB hard drive – a Western Digital Scorpio Blue, to be exact. It's adequate for backing up a few normal office PC's, but it doesn't have the kind of capacity to handle lots of massive media files, and I don't want to find myself running out of space in a year or two.
So I decided to upgrade the hard drive. I found a great deal on a a 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda LP. The Barracuda LP is an odd duck – it spins at 5900 RPM, designed more to save power than for high performance. That works for me, since this drive will mostly do nightly backups while I'm sleeping.
The LX195 case is a really nice piece of design and integration. I wish I could buy a case like this – most small cases for Mini-ITX boards will only accept a 2.5 inch laptop drive, but 3.5 inch drives have better performance and cost less. I followed the excellent instructions at Home Server Hacks to open the case:
The hard drive is mounted with vibration-reducing elastomeric grommets. It took less than five minutes to take out the 640GB Scorpio Blue and put in the Barracuda LP.
In my first attempt at upgrading, I used a PC to clone the 640GB drive onto the 1.5TB drive. This didn't work. Windows Server binds itself to the specific drive it's installed on. Windows Server booted, but it would not use the Seagate drive for backups or open the backups that were on it. This kind of hardware dependency is a bad thing.
The second, less desirable option was to use the server restore disk that came with the LX195 to create a fresh install of WHS on the Seagate drive. This is a fairly tedious procedure:
- Uninstall all WHS software from a PC.
- Connect that PC directly to the LX195 with a network cable.
- Run the server recovery program from the disk on that PC connected to the network the LX195.
- Use a paper clip to press a recessed switch on the LX195 at a certain point in its boot cycle.
This puts the LX195 into recovery mode. It should be able to reset itself to factory configuration using the information from the disk in the PC's DVD drive.
Problem is, that didn't work for me. The PC software would attempt to connect to the LX195 and fail, after about four minutes. It gave an error message so truly useless I didn't even bother to write it down – something like "step 3 failed".
After head-banging several times, time to call Hewlett Packard support. This was the excellent experience I'm becoming used to getting from HP support. No time wasted on brain-dead diagnostics or other nonsense. The tech had a simple solution: give the PC a specific static IP address, and start the recovery process again. This magic number is 169.37.37.42. It worked flawlessly, and a short time later I had a factory-fresh server with adequate storage.
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