Windows 2008 SBS - bare metal restore/disaster recovery

Hello,

I have created a bit of a problem for myself and hope to benefit from
the experience here.

I have an HP DL380 G4 running Windows 2008 SBS. The system has two
RAID arrays on the built in Smart Array 6i. The OS is a RAID1 array
comprised of two 146GB drives and the data array is RAID1+0 made from
4x 72.8GB drives. Each array contains a single partition using 100% of
the available space.

Everything on this server is operating perfectly and it’s been solid
for about five months.

I am creating/testing a new disaster recovery plan. In the past the
plan has been old school - reinstall server from scratch, configure,
patch, restore data. But given that I have backups from Windows Server
Backup (via the SBS Console), I thought I would try a bare metal
restore as it could save a lot of time. I booted into Windows Complete
PC Restore to try a bare metal restore to an HP DL385 G1 (AMD Opteron
equivalent of the DL380 G4). This system has 4x72.8GB drives
configured in a RAID1+0 array.

When attempting to restore, I get an error about the destination drive
being too small. If I understand correctly, the destination partition
has to be larger than the source partition in order for this to work.

Given where I am now, what options do I have in terms of a disaster
recovery plan?

Ideally I think I would like to use the Complete PC Restore route,
although given the hardware is a bit different, I am not sure it will
work properly anyway… and even if it did, is this the best option for
disaster recovery in WIndows 2008 SBS?

I don’t like to mess with a perfectly working server (if its not
broke..), but the server is only using 57GB of the 146GB RAID1 OS
partition, so presumably one option is to resize the array to say 70GB
and create a new partition with the remaining space. How reliable is
partition resizing with NTFS on Windows 2008? Can you recommend any
software to do it?

Another option is obviously to purchase some 300GB drives, but they
are pretty expensive so I would really rather not.

Any other ideas or recommendations?

Thanks
Blair
.

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