[WHS] Backing Up To A Partitioned External Drive
This past Christmas, I received a nice big external USB hard drive that I planned on using to store off-site backups of my Windows Home Server and PS3. The PS3's backups require a FAT32 partition, whereas the WHS will obviously work best with an NTFS file system, so I decided to partition the hard drive with two partitions for each of the systems. (For anyone who cares, I used GParted via a VirtualBoxed version of Ubuntu I use since the default Win7 partition manager won't create FAT32 partitions.)
The PS3 backup detected the correct partition and backed up like a charm. The WHS, however, didn't. Instead, it detected the PS3 partition I had created. It would correctly display the full size of the hard drive in the Server Storage tab, but when adding a new drive, it would only detect the PS3 partition (which was much, much smaller).
After some fiddling around (and accidentally reformatting the PS3 partition to NTFS, whoops!), it seems like the WHS will basically just take whichever drive has the lowest drive letter alphabetically. My PS3 partition had been set up with F:\ and the Backup partition was set up with G:\, so it was detecting the PS3 partition first. I swapped the drive letters and it detected the correct partition and everything worked swimmingly.
Kind of annoying, but I'm happy there's at least a workaround. I'm a little curious as to why WHS doesn't let you treat the individual partitions on an external drive separately, though.