rebuild server...

[tran008]

Hi all,

I'm in the process of rebuilding 1 of the server due to drive space. The new server is similiar to the old 1 execpt for bigger harddrive. Question? What do I need to do to copy the existing and transfer all system & files over to the new one? Would backup from the ntbackup be enough? What are the step to restore from ntbackup if it possible? Anyone gotcha or trap to look during the restore would be greatly appreciates.

thanks

 

[Jump1ng]

Well if your current drive setup is a single system drive (not raided) you can ghost the disk to the new disk keeping all the settings. This should go fairly quick and painless as everything will be copied over.

If you want to go down the route with NTbackup restore. You need to install Windows in a directory with a diffrent name from the current running system (if your windows is living in winnt you need to install a fresh windows in a diffrent named folder like winnt2..)

Then after you have installed your new fresh windows on the new drive you need to load the tape drivers and then do a full restore of your tape, say yes to overwrite files. When the restore is done you need to change the boot.ini file so that you can boot into the restored windows directory. That should be it.

Ohh make sure that you are backing up the systemstate or your restored windows will probably not work very well.

If you can ghost try that as it is much easier.

 

[ricpinto]

Ghost is a software to copy HDD to HDD or partition to partition. Also it can copy the whole HDD to a single file (image file) then you can restore it to a HDD when the need arises. The software is from

http://www.symantec.com

 

[tran008]

I saw lot of posted on Ghost, and from what I gather, it is not very friendly with raid. The currently system is running on 5 disk raid 5. Thank all for input.

 

[dholbrook]

What you want to do will not work if the raid drivers are different between the two systems. If the SCSI drivers are the same, than you can backup the first system to tape, including the system state.

If you are using the same box, motherboard, scsi cards, etc., and just changing out the drives for larger drives, then it should be possible to do the copy and re-install of the old system. If this is the case, build you new array, then copy the old system plus the system state to tape. Next install a basic OS only to the new drive configuration, and add the tape capability. After this restore from tape, including the system state, reboot, and you should have the old system back with the larger drive configuration.

NOTE: This will ONLY WORK if you are using the same SCSI RAID card as was used before, because if not then the scsi drivers needed for the OS will not be installed and you will not see the hard drives after you reboot.

After reading your posts a second time it appears that these are two different boxes, and if so, you do not have a real possibility to make the copy (or Ghost, for that matter)work unless the raid controllers in both boxes are the same and the motherboard is almost identical. Any plug in cards should not cause a problem but built in sound and net cards will also cause major grief, because the drives will clash and may crash the systems before you can get in to make the driver changes needed. Having different Raid cards is a death blow, the copy will fail.

HTH

David

 

[jtb]

trust me.

1. install server in rack
2. install os, security patches, applications
3. connect to nw
4. copy *data* from old server

don't try to copy boot or system partitions from one server to the other unless you like endless troubleshooting...

JTB
Have Certs, Will Travel
"A knight without armour in a [cyber] land."