Drive imaging help...



I just got a new Dell PowerEdge2800 server with four hard drives in
a RAID 5 configuration. Dell asked nothing about partition sizes or
RAID config, they just put all four drives in the RAID (no hot spare).
I want to change this to three drives in a RAID 5 with the fourth as
hot spare. I then want to partition this into two partitions.
My delima is whether to blow their pre-install (along with all
drivers, utilities, etc...) and completely rebuild, or try to image
this off to an external USB drive, rebuild the array, then restore the
image as a smaller partition (and then use Windows for create and
format the remaining space as the second partition).
If I use the imaging method, it will probably be a one time use as
this server is brand new, has planty of storage capacity, and has a
tape drive. So I really don't want to spend a lot on imaging software.
I also don't want to spend the next day or two doing a clean rebuild.
Please give any suggestions. If it is for particular imaging
software, please give specific version (ex. there is more than one
version on Norton Ghost 2003 - server, personal, etc...)
Thanks in advance.

Andrew Meador

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