Today, we're going to resurrect a 10-year old server: the venerable Acer
Aspire Easystore H340 Home Server that runs on a vintage Intel Atom processor.
Carbon dating indicates that I purchased it in December of 2009, and I shut it down and placed
it in storage about seven years ago, after the hard drive containing the operating system failed.
What I plan to do is not only boot into Windows 10 Professional on a flash drive,
but install four 5 TB disks giving me a total of 20 TB to play with.
To use the server today, the problems are numerous. Out-of-the-box, the server runs headless, which
means that it doesn't have any monitor output - so normally, you have to install, maintain, and monitor
the server remotely using these CDs on another computer on the network. Though the unit can hold
four SATA hard drives, it requires the operating system to be installed on the first drive,
which means that you share your storage with Windows. If it fails, as it did in my case,
the entire system goes down. Finally, the operating system is Windows Home Server, which is based on
the old Windows Server 2003 R2. Unfortunately, that version could only support hard drives up
to 2 TB in size, so the entire server could only support a maximum of 8 TB.
But remember: that number isn't a hardware limitation - it's a software limitation of Windows Home Server.
To overcome these problems, I'm going to install Windows 10 Pro on a USB drive. That gives me the
entire space of all four disks to use as storage, and I don't have to share Disk 1 with the
operating system. I plan to install a low profile ATI FireMV 2250 video card, which I picked up on
eBay for around $11. Eventually, I'll remote into the machine to maintain it, but while I'm accessing the
BIOS and installing Windows 10 Professional, I want to see what I'm doing. On the back of
this particular video card, it has a DMS-59 adapter. It kind of looks like a DVI port from a distance,
but you can see that it's much more dense than a DVI. The adapter I'm using is a leftover from
an old Dell server, and it has a DMS-59 connector on one end, and two DVI connectors on the other. If
you're following along in this video to retrofit your Acer server, some other items you'll need are
a phillips head screwdriver, an ESD wrist strap (to prevent any static damage), and a jumper that
connects two pins together on the motherboard. You may also want to grab some tweezers like the one
I have here, to help install the jumper. You'll also need a Windows 10 ISO file, the specifics of which I'll cover a little later.
Before we dismantle the unit, let's go over some of the features of the
hardware. As I mentioned before, it's powered by an Atom 230 processor. As far as speed is
concerned, all I care about is whether it has the horsepower to serve files, since I'm going to be
using it to feed my Plex Media Server. Scoring a whopping 210 passmark, it'll nevertheless be more
than fast enough for my purposes - and as a bonus, the processor consumes very little power with a
TDP of only 4 W. it comes with 2 GB of memory, and as we scan the rear of the unit
we have a gigabit Ethernet port along with four USB 2 ports, and even an eSATA port. At the front, we
have another USB 2 port, along with a door that reveals four 3.5" drive bays.
What you'll want to do first is unfasten these three screws in the back.
We can then remove the cover.
In order to access the BIOS, you'll need to cover two jumper pins on the motherboard.
Let's rotate the case to the side that has the small PCIe slot. Before we start, I'll put on my ESD strap around my wrist
and connect it to the metal part of the case. As we peer inside, you'll see the two pins right here. Taking
some tweezers, I'll grab a jumper and carefully...
gracefully...
delicately place it on the two pins. Next, let's prepare for installing the graphics card
in the PCIe slot. After turning the case a little bit, I'll first remove this screw in the back
and swivel the cover from the opening, then remove the back plate. Next, let's return the case to face the side
and take a look at the ATI FireMV 2250 graphics card. We'll need to match up its connector to the PCIe slot on the
motherboard. The main thing to look for is this angled metal corner, because it obstructs the card from going in.
It'll be a tight fit, so you'll need to adjust some of the bundles of cables as I show here, and then angle the card in.
Once it's sitting firmly in the PCIe slot, let's rotate the case again,
swivel the cover back on, and secure everything with the screw in the back -
and then we're done. While unclipping the ESD strap, I'll turn the case to
face the rear, where we can then return the case cover and screw everything back on.
I'll also take the DMS-59-to-DVI adapter and connect it to the output of the graphics
card, so we can be ready to hook it up to a monitor when the time comes to turn it on.
The next step is to create a bootable Windows media using this USB thumb drive.
You'll want to create it on another computer or laptop, so let's plug it into this USB port.
You'll then want to launch your favorite browser in order to search for rufus -
spelled r-u-f-u-s. After opening the first link that's returned in the search results, scroll down
a bit until you reach the Download section, then select the latest release. We'll save the file,
after which we'll open the folder location and double-click the executable to launch the program.
By default, the device will be set to your USB thumb drive. In the next field, you select the
Windows 10 ISO file that you want to install on the thumb drive, but there are some caveats: I've
already prepared a couple ISO files to show you what I mean. In my documents folder, I have
two official and legitimate ISO files downloaded directly from Microsoft's Azure education program,
which are for builds 1809 and 2004. There's a bug - not in Rufus, but in the 1809 build of Windows 10,
which causes blue screen crashes when attempting to boot off a USB drive.
In fact, if I choose the 1809 ISO and attempt to start the process
by selecting the Windows To Go image option, and choosing the Professional edition of Windows 10,
Rufus will give me a warning about the bug. Because of that, you'll want to choose any
build BUT 1809, such as 1803, 1903 or 2004, which I'll select right now. You'll want to make sure
the Windows To Go option is selected as the image option. I'll switch to the MBR partition scheme,
and the target system as BIOS or UEFI, accept all the other defaults, then hit the Start button.
In this particular image, I'm prompted to choose the edition of Windows 10 that matches my license,
so I'll choose Windows 10 Professional. Notice that the 1809 bug warning doesn't appear,
but it does warn me that any data that exists on the USB drive will be wiped out - and since I don't
have anything important on it, I'll click OK and continue. The creation of the bootable USB disk
will take some time, so I'll throw a turkey pot pie in the toaster oven, and I'll be right back.
OK, I'm back. Now that Rufus is done with the USB disk, we can close out
of it. Let's go ahead and eject the USB drive from Windows by right-clicking it
and selecting Eject. We can now physically remove it from the laptop, and then shift it over to the
server, where I'll insert it into a USB port there. We now have to make sure we have all
the cables we need to power it up, including the power cord, the DVI cable to the monitor,
a mouse and keyboard, where I'll plug the USB receiver for the wireless mouse to the wired keyboard...
which then plugs into a USB port, and finally, a network cable that plugs into the gigabit Ethernet port.
Without any hard drives in any of the four drive bays,
let's power up the system. If you're curious about the power consumption of the unit, I've attached
the power cord to a Kill A Watt meter, which shows that it ramps up to about 33 W as it powers up.
When the POST screen appears on the monitor, press F2 immediately in order to enter the BIOS.
Note that if we hadn't inserted the jumper on the motherboard, you wouldn't have been able to access
this screen at all. Moving to the main menu, you can see that the four SATA ports are empty, and
navigating to the boot screen shows the boot order, where our USB thumb drive appears as a choice.
Curiously, you'll also see another USB entry: the SMI USB Disk, which is 256 MB in size.
This is actually a small storage space that's included on the mainboard of the server,
which holds the installation files for Windows Home Server. If it had been larger, we might have
been able to install Windows 10 onto it and booted from there. As it happens, others have been able
to install FreeNAS in this small space. What you'll want to do is disable this boot device, because
we never want Windows Home Server to start its installation process. According to the instructions
on the right side, we need to hit Shift-1 to disable a device, which places an exclamation
mark in front of it. Make sure that our USB thumb drive is the first device in the list, after which
we can move to the Exit screen and save our changes. After viewing the POST screen again,
and after an agonizing few seconds, you should see... the Windows logo, which indicates that the
Windows To Go installation is starting. Eventually, you'll be presented with the Windows Setup wizard.
Now it's just a matter of going through the motions of installing Windows 10 Pro on a very
slow Atom processor, including the acceptance of terms, rebooting, waiting, and rebooting, and waiting.
I'll throw a whole turkey in the toaster oven, and come back when it's done.
OK, we're now in a freshly installed Windows 10 environment. The next step is to install the four
hard drives. Each drive bay is hot-swappable but I'm going to shut down the computer anyways.
The bays correspond to disks 0, 1, 2, and 3. I'm going to take out all the trays so we can mount
the disks in them. Let's start with the bottom tray. Since it's a tool-less caddy, what you'll
want to do is align the pins of the tray with the holes on the disk. Start with this left side first,
and then bend the flexible right side to insert its pins into the right side of the hard drive.
We can now return the tray to its drive bay, and once we have the other disks mounted in their
trays, we can insert the others. Afterwards, let's start up the server again. Checking the Kill A Watt
meter with all four disks installed, we see it spike to as high as 90 W before it drops
to a steady state of about 51 or 52. After booting into Windows, I'd like to first prepare the server
for remote access, after which i'll configure the disks. Let's go to the search bar and type "allow",
which should return a link to "Allow remote access to this computer" Click on that link, which will
launch the settings app, taking us directly to the remote desktop settings. Please note that this is a
feature of Windows 10 Professional, and you won't have this ability if you have the Home edition.
Under that section, hit the Show Setting link next to the first checkbox label, which pops up a dialog
box where we can select "Allow remote connections to this computer", then click OK. You can always
use the hostname to remote into the server, but I like to assign static IP addresses to my computers.
Let's right click the network icon in the taskbar and choose "Open Network and Network
Settings." There's more than one way to assign a static IP address, but I usually go through the
Network and Sharing Center, after which I click my ethernet connection, click its Properties button,
select TCP/IP v4, and hit Properties - where I can set an IP address. I'll assign one that isn't
in my DHCP pool - let's say .99... then fill out all the other information, including the subnet mask,
default gateway, and DNS server. We can now click OK, close out of Ethernet Properties, then close the dialog box.
Now let's go back to the laptop, which is on the same network as the server.
Hit the Start menu and type "remote", which should return Remote Desktop Connection as the first
choice. Type the computer's name or the IP address of the server - in my case, as you may recall,
it's a static IP of 192.168.1.99. After hitting Connect, then entering the username and password...
and waiting a few moments for the connection to be established to the server...
you should now be able to see the server's desktop in the resolution of your laptop's monitor. From
here I'll configure the hard drives. We can either use the disks individually by initializing them in
Disk Management - where you can see the four hard drives appear in their uninitialized states as
Disks zero through three... or we can take advantage of Microsoft Storage Pools and Storage Spaces.
For instance, if I wanted to have two Storage Pools, each one having a set of mirrored drives,
I could hit the search bar and then type "storage spaces." Click the returned result...
where you can then create a new Storage Pool using the hard drives we've just inserted.
Since a mirror requires two disks, let's choose disks 0 and 1 by deselecting 2 and 3. After it
creates the pool, I can name the Storage Space - let's call it DATA01. Virtually, those two physical
disks will be assigned the letter F. I'll select a Two-way mirror, but you can experiment with
Three-way mirror where you need at least three drives, or Parity, which closely resembles RAID
5 or 6. We'll keep the size at its maximum of 5 TB and create the Storage Space. But
that's only one Storage Pool. To make another set of mirrored disks, we can create another pool by
clicking the link on the left, where I'll keep the selections of disks 2 and 3 to generate the pool...
then we'll call this mirrored Storage Space DATA02, giving me a disk G when all is said and done. Next,
we'll want to share the F and G drives so that other computers on the network can access them.
After closing out Storage Spaces, I'll launch File Explorer, where I can see the two mirrored spaces
we just created, each one having a capacity of 5 TB. Incidentally, notice that the C drive is
actually the USB flash drive, which includes the E boot partition created by Rufus, while D is the 256 MB
onboard USB device. By right-clicking F, I can go to its properties, and the sharing tab to
enable and define the name of the share, limit the number of users, and optionally assign the
users who can access the share. After closing out of the dialog boxes for the first drive,
I'll do the same thing for the G drive by again launching its properties, navigating to the Sharing
tab, where I'll just leave everything on default in the Advanced Sharing section for the purposes
of this video. Remember, all this time we've been on the laptop connecting remotely into the server.
I'll now minimize the remote desktop session to return to the laptop. Let's start File Explorer
on the laptop, where I'll try to access the shared drives on the server. Let's type
\\192.168.1.99, which brings up the shared folders for which I have at least read-only access.
I just had some final notes on some minor problems that I encountered with this project.
The blue lights that indicate the existence of a hard drive in each bay
didn't light up. In addition, I found that the information icon on the front panel
kept blinking, but i'm keeping it in a closet in the basement so that doesn't bother me too much.
Also note that because of the Atom CPU, things may run slowly when you remote into it, but I've
experienced no slowness in file transfers, with speeds reaching close to what you'd expect from
a gigabit connection. I now use the server without a monitor, knowing that I can attach one at any
time in case something goes wrong with remote access.
I hope you enjoyed - thanks for watching!