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Acronis for Upgrading the Server Hard Disk

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by eelamt

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Here is the Issue:

We have about 20 Dell PowerEdge 2950 with RAID 1 (mirrored) running on our production. The proble is the drives of these servers are very small they are about 40 GB, we have two partitions C:\ and D:\ both of them are almost full so planning to upgrade the hard drives to bigger size. the probel is we dont want to reinstall the server since they have lots of custom applications running. I have Acronis Enterprise Echo and planning to do this task.

COuld kindly anybody can help me how can i do this.. like what steps and so on...

my plan is.

Step 1: take the backup of the hard drive using Acronis backup

Step 2: remove the old Raid hard drives (Raid 1 so two drives)

Step 3: Put the new two drives in to the server

Step 4: boot the server with Acronis bootable CD

Step 5: chose the restore option and select the backup image and start the restore

***** would i get a blue screen since i did not configure the RAID on the new drives?

Help me out with the procedure...

Thank you so much in Advance!!!!

6 replies

by churdoo

I like the fact that you're removing the old disks completely and installing new disks. This means that, not only do you have the Acronis backup, you also have the old disks and can fall back to the old disks if necessary. Nice job!

Your question about not having configured the RAID, is corrected by:

Step 3.5: Use the ROM-based Array Configuration Utility to configure the new RAID. You will be prompted to do this anyway because when you power up the server after having changed the disks, the RAID controller will detect the old RAID missing and the new disks and you will have to reconfigure in the ACU.

by eelamt

so lets say .. i reconfigured the RAID for the new drive and my Acronis backup failed and I was force to put the old HDD to bring the server up... when i put the old drives back.. wont't the RAID will have problem and maybe erase all of my data on the HDD?

by churdoo

No it won't. Even RAID configurations are redundant -- not only does the Controller keep the RAID configuration on board, but every member disk has its RAID information written on the disk, this is called the RIS (RAID Information Sector I think). Therefore if replacing the original disks back in a given server, upon startup the RAID controller will read the RIS of all of the disks and will recognize that the disks are part of their original array. The controller ACU will prompt you to confirm.

You do have another option by the way. Of course you still want to make sure you have a good backup for a fallback. You can replace each of the disks of the server one at a time (are the disks hot-swappable?), letting the array rebuild before replacing the second disk. After the second disk is replaced and the array rebuilt again, you will have extra space on the now larger disks whereby you can EXTEND the array. With the array now larger, you can use Acronis Disk Director if you have it, to resize the NTFS volumes, assuming you have them as BASIC and not DYNAMIC disks.

Either method will work. Since we know you already have Echo, you should probably stick with your original plan. I just included this alternative plan to be thorough and to illustrate a method by which you would not have to do a server restore.
--C

by wearearewe

I'm attempting to accomplish the same result on Server 2003 but using Acronis Home 2009:

The existing RAID1 array is 80GB WD 7200 RPM

1. Added a 2nd RAID1 array, 300GB WD 10K RPM
2. Image 1st RAID1 array to 2nd using Acronis Home 2009 booted from CD
3. Using RAID utility change 2nd array to bootable

Server attempts to boot but hangs. Please excuse my ignorance but is it because of the imaging software?

TIA for your educated help.

by cg it

Love Acronis but when I've done this, restoring an image to a new RAID array with larger drives, I've always had boot problems. Once I got the boot problems solved, I had to resize the drives to take advantage of the new free space. while that usually goes ok, there is still that chance for corrupted data. What we thought would be an 6 hour job ended up the entire weekend.

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