Dell Server Upgrade

[birdman73]

Hello all,

I'm new to this forum, so please bear with me.

Our office recently purchased a new PowerEdge 1800, dual 3.2 Ghz Xeon CPUs, 2GB RAM, and 3-160GB hard drives. Dell says they configured it for RAID 5. Well, our current server is a PowerEdge 600SC, very basic. We currently have a RAID 0+1 configuration. I'm not the original guy who set this up, so I'm going by what I saw on the Computer Management screen, under admin tools on the control panel. We have a C: drive of only 12GB and a D:\ drive containing all of our data and exchange server. Disk 0 is mirrored to Disk 1. Disk 0 and Disk 1 are 40GB. So, what I want to do is try to use Ghost to copy the Disk 0 to the new Disk 0 and go from there, however, I want the C: drive to be larger than the 12GB that it is currently. Is there a way to copy the old drive to the new and increase the partition size after the fact or will I need to set the partition size on the new disk 0? Has anyone ever done anything like this and if so, what is your recommendation. As you can probably tell, I've not dealt with RAID issues before. Most of my experiences have been with workstations and desktops, which are a little simpler to work with than servers, in my experiences.

Anyway, I'd appreciate any help.

thanks,

--Birdman73--

--"I have not failed; I've only found 10,000 ways that it won't work." - Thomas Edison

[Dangerous]

Hi Birdman!

Welcome to The PC Guide!! In response to your question, I think you are going to be out of luck. You won't be able to Ghost your system drive (C:\) to a new server, all the hardware is going to be different - you'll have a nightmare. This means that you are going to have to rebuild your Exchange box, which I'm sure you are keen to avoid!

I'm not even sure you can Ghost RAID arrays? Anyone know if this is possible? If you can, then you should be able to just Ghost the partition you are interested in and then resize it with Partition Magic or similar - but again, this is not going to help you, you are going to have to rebuild the Exchange server... it's not too daunting a task, especially if you have only a single server to worry about! - If you do end up going down this route, post a new message in the software forum and we'll help you out! :) Of course, you could always leave the exchange server as it is and move all the other functions onto your new server ;)

What version of Windows and Exchange is on your old Server? Are you running Active Directory for user and computer management?

Good luck,
Dave!

[birdman73]

Hey Dave, thanks for responding to my problem.

As you can probably tell, I'm a bit of a newbie to servers. I've been building and troubleshooting workstations for about 5 years, but when it comes to the server in our office, I've never had a problem. I downloaded a booklet on server migration from Microsoft, and I when I read your e-mail, I already had discovered that ghosting was not an option. LOL!! Can we say duh!! I guess that what we amatuers run into sometimes. Luckily, I do my research BEFORE I started ANY computer upgrade. I've contacted a friend of mine who has his own networking business, and he said he could do it with no problem. However, I will be watching so I'll know what to do next time we upgrade, if ever.

Again, thanks for responding. I've already bookmarked this site in the event I need to consult it again. From what little I have seen already, it looks like it will be a very good site to visit from time to time.

-B-