Upgrading drives in a RAID 5 array

How do you do your backups? If you have good backup software and are backing up to tape, you could use the tape backups to restore from rather than spending the time to run xcopy (which isn't that reliable, either). Even better, if you can or havealready purchased either Arcserve or Backup Exec, they both have disaster recovery add-ons that will allow you to completely restore a system from tape backup without reloading the OS. This would be a good example of why this software is useful. Ihave not found any way other than a complete reinitialization of the array and complete restore to accomplish what you're trying to do. Hope this helps!

Hello there,

You forgot to mention a couple things here. First of all, are you talking about SERVERS here?I guess you are, What OS are you using.
Let's asume you're using NT or W2K, so probably your partitiond are NTFS, so xcopy won't work, evenif it did you will end in problems, Xcopy won't copy files in use, it won't copy shares, properties or security that probably you had setup on your folders.
My advice would be, make a FULL backup of ALL your data, using either Backup Exec or ARCServe, a real server backup software, then you could give it a try with GHOST from Norton, it is very good and it will help you to upgrade your server.
However there are some more tips and details that you may need.
If you want I can help you further,please e-mail me back all the info about your hardware and Software installed.

Good luck,
@lberto
alberto@wirelesscuracao.com

Depending on how good your Raid controller is you may just be able to take out the 9 Gig drives one at a time and replace them with the 36's and have the Raid rebuild on the larger drives. Once all three 36's are in it should recognize that the three drives are larger and make the raid size larger. I would highly recommend checking with your RAID manufacturer first though.

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