Dear Mervin,
My learned colleague Phillip is right on the money in terms of using
symantec's ghost, but I wish to chime in a bit more detailed step-by-step
information to save you the sometimes painful learning curves that I went
through.
First of all, go out and buy yourself five of these puppies right here:
http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/p...4&sku=340-9387
Here are some technical specs for your box:
http://forums.us.dell.com/supportfor...&message.id=31
These are 146 scsi hard drives for your PowerEdge 700 which will set you
back 335 bucks a pop - if you get flak for the cost, ask your finance people
how much it would be worth to loose all of their data. I have first hand
experience with a Dell PowerEdge 2300 being set up cheap and 6 months worth
of Exchange Server data were lost because they went skinny on the important
stuff. . . and any person here will tell you that losing that much data can
cause you grief.
Before you even start toying with this, make sure you back up your data onto
more than one tape and verify that you can restore that information onto an
alternate location. I dont care if you back up a single directory filled
with Playmates of the month photos, just make sure that your backup and
restores work.
To start, that power edge may have a scsi bay or, as I like to call it, a
"scsi barn" with a backplane. That backplane may either be connected
directly to your motherboard or indirectly from the back of that barn to what
is known as a PERC adapter. If you have a perc adapter, its basically the
ability to set up your disks through a hardware RAID. Raids being something
that I always recommend.
Okay, so lets say that you dont have the RAID array. Head over to your disk
management by right clicking my computer and hitting manage. If you see both
your hard disks there, you don't have a PERC adapter cause (perc being
hardware raid) it would show up as a single device.
Identify which drive is your system drive. If its a mirrored drive through
the Perc adapter its going to be harder because you essentially need to use
ghost to copy the data from that array to ghost. To simplify things, I would
break the mirror between those two drives, then fire up the box with a single
drive, remove the second drive, pop in the big new drive and then boot ghost
through a bootable dos disk.
The problem is that if ghost fires up through DOS, it may not be able to see
that scsci hard disk drive because it may need drivers to see that darn
thing. In that case, you need to talk to Dell or Symantec for that purpose.
When you get past that and ghost's dos-like interface is up, you use the
arrow keys to select a source drive and a destination drive. The drive sizes
will show up and then its pretty intuitive. When you copy the data from your
12 gig scsi drive to your new bigger drive and make that drive your boot
drive, your system partition (if you only have a c drive) will suddenly grow
to immense proportions.
If you have the poor man's model, you are looking at run of the mill hard
disk drives and thats just a question of jumpering the drives for master
(your source drive), to slave (your target, bigger drive). If you dont have
Scsi it may be easier in terms of ghost. If you boot through a bootable disk
(like a Win98 startup disk) and then fire up the ghost.exe executable through
the dos interface, ghost will see that you have a master and slave drive,
rather, a target and destination drive. The same will apply, ghost will use
the IDE cable to transfer the data and then you simply replace the master
drive with the slave drive after you have jumpered it as the master and
remove the old master. When you fire up the box, the new drive will be the
OS.
Some pitfalls: Your box may not be able to see a large IDE hard drive
because of limitations, so here is my ultimate recommendation.
Whether you have scsi or non scsi hard drives, get the drives in the sizes
that you need. Back up your data any way you can and, regardless, make sure
that your backup worked.
Now install the hardware and do a bare-bones installation of your Windows
2003 Server Small Business from scratch. This may seem like a bit more
trouble, but you will appreciate the results in the long run. Your system
will be as good as it was the day your bought it and likely run better and
faster than it does today.
I hope that this helps you in your efforts. If you need anything futher,
please respond here and I will get you more info.
Regards,
Walter Ellena
--
The Dumbest Question is the one that is never asked.
"Phillip Windell" wrote:
> Symantec Ghost
> Runs from a bootable floppy (DOS)
>
> --
> Phillip Windell [MCP, MVP, CCNA]
> www.wandtv.com
>
> "Mervin Williams" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
> news:(E-Mail Removed)...
> >I am running Small Business Server Premium 2003 on a Dell PowerEdge 700
> >server. I have two drives in that machine and, unfortunately, the primary
> >drive is only 12Gb and nearly full. Is there some tool that will allow me
> >to create an image of the current primary drive and copy onto a new, larger
> >hard drive? If so, what are some of the complications, if any, that I'll
> >run into with the OS when copying the image to the new, but different, hard
> >drive?
> >
> > Thanks in advance,
> >
> > Mervin Williams
> >
>
>
>
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