Reinstall or restore with different disk config
- From: "C_O" <noemailacceptedhere@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 4 May 2005 22:53:38 -0700
Can I change my hard disks hardware without losing everything I have
configured?
The background:
I ran into some major problems with IIS going on a self destruct path by
corrupting the MetaBase.xml file (looks like something tried to mix UniCode
and ASCII while massaging the file). So I finally figured out how to restore
the system state. I had to physically copy a backup file from the USB hard
drive to the hard disk in order for Restore to be able to walk it (another
interesting bug..., but that's for another thread). Anyway, I wonder if the
corruption might be related to a couple of hard disk I/O errors I see on
every restart. Seems something is getting ahead of itself. There is an event
stating the drive is not ready followed by an event recording a write error.
Duh, it seems something in the IIS initialization does not wait for the
drive to be ready and just tries to blast a write through. This has been
happening on every restart. After that, no disk error for days. Only on
start.
My current disk config is hardware RAID1 using the VIA SATA RAID 1 built
into the motherboard (fairly new Epox model). The RAID is managed by the
BIOS. This means that Windows sees only one drive, and is not aware that it
is a RAID. I suspect that there is a problem with the Windows driver (or,
more exactly, with how the BIOS driver interacts with the Windows driver),
and that I should try to revert to letting Windows handle the RAID. In other
words, do a backup, turn off the BIOS RAID, do a normal install with SATA0
as the hard drive, then enable mirrorring on SATA1 in the Windows storage
manager. Presumably, if Windows is doing the mirroring it may be a little
more aware of timing issues than if the mirroring is happening behind the
scenes in the BIOS based driver.
The question:
So, the question is, can I do this without losing everything I have
configured? This is SBS Standard. I have documented my config changes but it
would be nice not to have to have to go through all the exercise again. The
only critical part, however, is Exchange data. As I am still in testing
mode, there is only one user and the only thing he's really using is
Outlook, but he's asked me to keep the downtime to less than half a day and
his mailbox intact. Also, it looks like rejoining clients to a bare metal
reinstall is going to be a hassle. Any suggestions?
Also, will I run into activation problems with a full reinstall? (I never
got the activation grace period one is supposed to get with the paid
product--within 2 days of first install the activation block would not let
me do anything without activating--something else to inspire confidence...)
TIA
C_O
.
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