T7600 Precision Workstation drive bay question

Question

Thanks in advance if you can help me with this question. I love my T7600. I have had it since I bought it at the Dell Outlet in 2014. Especially fond of the easy access components like the power supply and 8 hard drive bays. I don't have any big problems right now. I recently successfully cloned my 500GB SSD boot drive to a 1T SSD with FSS Casper software.

However, when cloning my 1T Seagate HDD to a 6T Toshiba HDD, the operation failed 3 times with an error message that the source drive may have a cabling problem. So I am trying to find a work-around for this situation. One of the questions that no one has been able to answer for me is...

1. In the T7600, can I pull a drive out of its bay and put it into a different bay without causing a problem with the system?

I do not have RAID. I don't have to move any of the SSDs. Just one or more of the 3.5 drives. None of the HDDs have specific Volume Labels. Would naming them make a difference?

I would be thrilled if you can answer that question - it seems simple, but I can find no reference to moving hard drives around in accessible bays perhaps because so few people have this ability.

Just in case you are interested, more details...

I am a cartoonist, filmmaker, graphic designer, etc. hence the need for space. The 1T drive I am trying to clone is my D drive. It is in drive bay 0. It holds important active folders like MS OneDrive, and temp files like app data. Not just stuff I have saved. After cloning failed using a SATA to USB adaptor, I put the target drive into drive bay 3. I had to format the drive and give it a drive letter H in order for Window 10 to see it. Since I have received the same error message 3 times, that the problem is likely the SATA connection in Bay 0, I would like to try moving the D drive to a different bay. I would have to remove or switch with a different drive to do that. If that doesn't work, it probably means the problem is not the cabling to the 0 bay. At least I will know that and start trying some other work-arounds.

My Specs: T7600 Precision Workstation
CPU: 2 x Intel Xeon Four Core E5-2609 0 (2.4Ghz, 10M, 6.4GT/s)
32GB (4x8GB) 1600MHz DDR3 ECC RDIMM
1 PNY NVIDIA Quadro M4000 Graphics Card VCQM4000-PB
1300W PSU
Windows 10 Pro 64bit
No RAID
Samsung 860 EVO 1TB 2.5 Inch SATA III Internal SSD (MZ-76E1T0B/AM) Boot

Drive num	Title-type-brand-model number	size	GBs-Ts	BUS num	Drive Bay
C	ATA SAMSUNG SSD 860 SCSI	2.5	1T	1	5
D	ATA ST1000DM003 1CH1 T SCSI	3.5	1T	4	0
G	ATA ST3000DM001 1CH1 3T SCSI	3.5	3T	6	2
F	ATA TOSHIBA DT01ACA2 2T SCSI	3.5	2T	5	1
M	ATA WDC WD20NPVX-00E 2T SCSI	2.5	2T	0	4
H	ATA TOSHIBA HDWR460 6T SCSI	3.5	6T	7	3

bradthetechnut · Accepted Answer

'If you change the drive letter of a drive where Windows or apps are installed, apps might have trouble running or finding that drive. For this reason we suggest that you don't change the drive letter of a drive on which Windows or apps are installed. Aug 7, 2020' - That's the little advisory I mentioned. You can certainly change the drive letters. Are you still using both 1TB and 6TB boot drives?  A couple of ideas.  1. Just use the 6TB and leave the 1TB out.  Or, if both are in, you'd likely have to go into the boot menu to pick which one to boot from.  2. Wipe the 1TB drive and use it for storage. As for question #3, I'm not quite sure why you would want to do all of that.  You should be able to change drive letters with both drives in, whichever one you boot from.  If you can't change drive letters on the drive you booted from, leaving both drives in, boot from the 1TB drive, change drive letter for 6TB to something other than D, any letter that isn't used already.  Then you should be able to change 1TB drive letter to H.  Then change 6TB drive to D. Hopefully that all makes sense.  See, if you have a D drive in, and you try to change the 6TB drive to D, it won't let you change it.  Can't have 2 drives with same drive letter, even if temporary. If you're more comfortable with removing a drive to boot from the other, rather than use F12 Boot Menu, that's fine. While I've changed drive letters before, I don't know that I ever changed drive letters on the drive I booted from.  So that's my best advice.

bradthetechnut · Answer

First, it's a nice presentation you did. : )

Changing HDD's around shouldn't a problem. BIOS still normally recognizes boot drive & etc. I say "normally" since some do have trouble with cloned drives.

2 items that could get in the way. 1. You may know cloning OS isn't supported by the mfr., but doesn't necessarily mean not working.* 2. At the time of mfr., max listed HDD for the T7600 was 3TB. A smaller size than 6TB may have to be tried or considered.

*I'm 100% sure if you're cloning OS or data/files. If it's data/files, and it turns out to not be truly a cabling problem, then a slightly smaller than 6TB HDD may be necessary.

Additional Boot Sequence info on pg. 47 of the T7600 Owner's Manual.

Drives can be named without losing data and if it helps a person keep track, that's fine too.

I only named 1 of my drives. So, if I change OS or rearrange drives and drive letter inadvertantly changes, the name is still the same, and I can change the drive letter back to my preference. It doesn't make a difference as to how Windows sees it unless drive letter is changed. You might know - a little advisory pops up if drive letters are changed.

Difficult Woman · Answer

Thanks so much for the reply! I cloned the OS from a 500Gb Samsung SSD to a 1T version of the same model. That has seemed to work great.

The D drive that has been a problem is not really just data files. It's just 1T and sometimes I chose to install some software on it so as not to overburden the boot SSD. My bad to make things more complicated for myself.

Your advice has opened up some possibilities for me. The first thing I will try is to move the 1T D drive and check that connection thing. If it is okay, I can post my results and progress here if that might be helpful to someone else in the future. I discovered a website run by gamers and a whole lot of them are snapping up these Dell workstations and upgrading them. They wont help me with my problem though, probably not exciting enough.

Would you like me to mark this Accepted a Solution now? Or should I wait?

Thanks, Shary

bradthetechnut · Answer

'I'm 100% sure if you're cloning OS or data/files.'  I meant to say 'I'm not 100% sure if...'

bradthetechnut · Answer

That's nice of you to ask about the Accepted Solution thing.  I have a commitment to accuracy and it looks like you do too.  I'd wait to make sure that my advice worked.  And then may be note which part did since many things were mentioned.

Difficult Woman · Answer

Yay! Cloning 1T to 6T drive was finally successful!

I did a lot more research and head scratching after our last discussion. I went back and took a lot of the details in the Future Systems Knowledge Base more seriously.

I had never heard of Dynamic drives. So I checked, and all of my drives are Basic, so that wasn’t the source of my problem.

To be absolutely careful, I backed up everything on the 1T D drive – even had to force my way into Microsoft’s hidden AppData folder to copy the two useless folders that were in it. That took a long time. But making that folder accessible could have made a big difference.

Before biting the bullet and moving the drive to a different bay, I decided to try the cloning operation in Safe Mode.

Just FYI, Windows 10 or FSS Casper refused to boot into simple Safe Mode, but worked fine with Safe Mode With Networking (– because we have so many drives?)

Then I held my breath for about four hours of the cloning process, frequently dropping into my office to take pictures of the progress with my phone in case it stopped halfway through again.

Whew! The cloning worked, but now I have to figure out the next steps. I knew this next question would be coming…

I have shut down the T7600.

So, now I have the 6T Drive H/D Clone in Bay 3, and the 1T D in its original Bay 0.

Any idea which of these or something different might work?....

Before booting, do I remove the 1T D from Bay 0 and replace it with the 6T Drive H/D Clone, then boot into Windows and change the H drive letter to D?
Do I leave the 6T Drive H/D Clone in Bay 3, remove the 1T D from Bay 0, then boot and change H to D?
I wonder if I could leave the 1T D drive in 0, and remove the 6T H drive and set it aside. Then boot. Then pull D, replace with H and change the drive letter then. That would prevent a potential freak-out at start-up. Best solution so far?

I think I have to change H to D because Microsoft says

“If you change the drive letter of a drive where Windows or apps are installed, apps might have trouble running or finding that drive. For this reason we suggest that you don't change the drive letter of a drive on which Windows or apps are installed. Aug 7, 2020”

I do have some apps installed on D, plus my OneDrive folder.

I am going to sleep on this and see if the perfect plan materializes! Thanks for hanging in there with me.

Difficult Woman · Answer

Thank you so much for all your super-responsive hand-holding and the advice I have needed to do this! Much appreciated!

(And just FYI, neither drive I have been working with is the boot drive. That SSD has been working fine.)

Here is what I did…

Before starting the T7600, I removed the 1T-"D" Seagate HDD from bay 0.

Then I moved the 6T -"H" Toshiba HDD to bay 0.

Pushed the Start button. T7600 started in Safe Mode (as I had left it last night, but not expected today.)

I have been snapping pics of the screen that appears when the PC boots up that shows me all my drives, their serial numbers, size, and type. Now, it showed all my drives except the 1T Seagate that had been D (which is good because I had removed it.).

In Safe Mode, I right-clicked on the Windows MENU button and selected Disk Management.

Looking at all the drives in the Disk Management window, I was alarmed to see that the 6T drive “H” showed up as a “Healthy Primary Partition” of 2048 GBs with 1215.97 GB free space! I freaked out a little, worried that the T7600 wouldn’t be able to see all of the 6T drive. But I decided to change the drive letter and see what happened next.

I right-clicked on the H drive and chose “Change Drive Letter and Paths for H:”

Followed the prompts to change the letter to “D”. That appeared to work right away.

I restarted the T7600, and now the “D” drive came up with the correct number of GBs – 5.4 Terabytes.

The computer started again in Safe Mode, which I did not want.

So, to get out of Safe Mode, I had to restart by pressing the Windows Key + R to open the Run window.

I typed MSConfig and pressed OK. That opened the System Configuration menu.

I went to the Boot tab and unchecked Safe Boot.

However, I noticed that it changed the settings on the first tab, so I went back and forth a couple of times before I realized the settings were connected. If I uncheck Safe Boot, I should leave everything else as is.

Pressed Apply and Okay. Restarted. It took a long time to start up, but I think maybe there were some things getting adjusted.

Basically, everything seems to be normal now. OneDrive is acting weird. It was checked Read-Only, and seems to be doing some sort of syncing, but I am well backed up, so not too worried about that.

I am VERY HAPPY!!!!

bradthetechnut · Answer

'6T drive 'H' showed up as a 'Healthy Primary Partition' of 2048 GBs with 1215.97 GB free space!  I freaked out a little,...'  Same here, I would've freaked out a little on the inside. You're welcome and I'm glad it all worked out!!  : )

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T7600 Precision Workstation drive bay question

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