Re: Upgrade Drives Question

If you want to make your life easier, I have the following suggestion. Leave
the current drives in place, add the 2 new ones on the second controller,
move the data from the current D drive to the new drives, do a backup (SBS
Wizard). and wipe the old D partition.
Now you can try to use partext (Dell tool to extend the C onto the whole
drive. With some servers that doesn't work but I would try that first. If
that doesn't work, reboot, wipe the C partition as well, run the basic
install of the 2003 Server (including SP1) and then restore from the backup
on your new drives.

--
Claus
"David Lee" <david.lee@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:yOydnXCI0ssRdNLYnZ2dnUVZ_s6dnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxx
Hello all,

I have 3 Dell SBS 2003 servers (2 clients and our own), all with the same
issue.

- all have 2 drives in a RAID 1 configuration, partitioned C and D (1 also
has a hidden Dell partition for diagnostics - the other 2 were installed
from scratch).
- we want to add 2 more drives to take over as C (in a RAID 1 config), and
repartition the existing drives to become D (also in RAID 1).

The existing controllers (2 SATA RAID controllers, and 1 SCSI PERC/4) can
handle the new configs, so the only 'new' hardware will be the drives
themselves.

So the question is: what's the best method of doing this? I'm more than
willing to buy the right tools, but extensive Googling has only resulted
in more questions than answers (seems not a lot of folks have done exatly
this, or documented the results - hence my post here).

The choices I see are:

- Do a disaster restore, a la NT Backup (seems tedious, and I'd rather
learn to use other best practices if anything else truly is 'better').
- Image the partitions and copy to the new drives (what software to use? -
Acronis Workstation or Server / Ghost? - I'm officially confused and not
willing to spend $700US on Acronis Server - that's just nuts).
- Some kind of Swing Migration (happy to buy Jeff's package if this is
what makes sense - already have all of Harry's books as well as Mr.
Neale's).

Sadly, I've never done or practiced any of the above (I feel shame), but
I'm willing to build a box to do this (yes Susan, I read your blog).


Thanks & cheers,

David



.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: C partition too small - suggestions welcome
    ... the MS way is to backup and restore to larger drives. ... How to Move Small Business Server 2000 Company and Users Shared Folders ... You can move the page file to another partition. ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs)
  • Software Raid for clones
    ... Personally I inherited this E6750 ASUS motherboard and wanted thought I'd build a nice server for general use. ... I added 4 SATA 250 Gb disc drives and after reading about the horrors & failures of the cheapie Raid controllers, I decided to try Linux software raid. ... I got a message from every MD partition that there were not ... Disk partitions and LVM limits ...
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  • Re: Rebuilding SBS Server 2003 SP2
    ... book and of course the help files inc with SBS, ... Server 2003 Administrators Companion. ... mirroring with two drives. ... Just stick in one drive for the OS and partition for the OS and data, ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs)
  • Re: Rebuilding SBS Server 2003 SP2
    ... and of course the help files inc with SBS, ... Your promise of not needing to re-install my server interests me VERY much ... mirroring with two drives. ... Just stick in one drive for the OS and partition for the OS and data, ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs)
  • Re: Upgrade Drives Question
    ... Before we purchased TrueImage Server we used TrueImage Workstation to perform some imaging operations on the server and all went smoothly. ... I'm putting in Raptor drives to be the C: partition for reliability and performance, and want to use the existing drives for data. ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs)