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Replacing all hard drives on SBS 2003 server?

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by cgore82

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Being the network admin I'm almost ashamed to be asking this, but... my Win SBS 2003 Standard server is running out of disk space quickly, and unfortunately my only option besides adding an external drive is to replace the 2 hard drives currently installed on the server. They are 2 120GB drives installed as a RAID 1 setup, and I'm planning on replacing them with 2 500GB drives. I was thinking some sort of ghosting program, but wanted to get some opinions first. Any help people??

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by oh smeg

After you Clone the Drive and fit the new drives to the Server you can then rebuild the RAID with the RAID Management Utility that the Server uses.

I've done this with Damaged File Systems in the past without any problems. But they where not damaged so much that the Server wouldn't boot just enough to prevent rebuilding of the Array when things went wrong.

I had to this this recently on a 80 GIG Hitachi Array when one of the Drives failed and there where no more 80 GIG SATA Drives available to the place that used this unit. They had 160 GIG Drives to use and that was all that was available to be used to replace the dead Drive. So I Cloned the one remaining working Drive and used that as the basis of the new Array. All RAID 1 and not a problem as they couldn't run the risk of damaging the OS running the Server even though they had a Full Solid Backup they just didn't want to be without the server while it got rebuilt if the OS was damaged in any way.

Being Doctors I sort of understood their predicament and worked after hours to set it right so that they would have a working system when the place opened next mourning.

Col

by cgore82

Thanks, that helps! So you're saying I should be able to swap out one of the current 120GB drives with one of the new 500GB, and then clone the old directly onto the new? And then install the other 500GB build the RAID 1 array? Any suggestions as to what cloning software would be good to use for this?

by oh smeg

As for Software I used Norton's Ghost but any Cloning Software should work without problems.

The last time that I did this I removed the 1 working drive from the Server and used it in another Desktop to Clone the Drive but that was because the Server isn't overly great and I couldn't install any software to it. But I can see no reason why it wouldn't work that way.

Just make sure that you have a Backup as well as the other Drive before proceeding though.

Col

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