Upgrading from NT4 to 2003 - 4GB Partition - Ouch

[cwainright]

One of the branch offices of my company was still running NT4 on their server as a BDC for our Active Directory up until yesterday.

We upgraded it to Server 2000 and now Server 2003. As you might guess, we're having some storage problems since the original OS drive was only 4GB. It's on a RAID 5 split up into 2 partitions. The other partition is ~600GB with over 500GB of data on it.

If at all possible, I would like to resize the partitions, however partition magic won't run on Server 2003. We found one utility, "Partition Commander" which claims it will run on 2003, but it doesn't support RAID 5 arrays.

I have tape backups of all the data, but if at all possible I don't want to have to format everything, remake the partitions, and restore data from tape. At the moment we've made a 4GB OS partition work, however I definately don't see this as a permanant solution. Can anyone offer any suggestions?

Much thanks!

 

[58sniper]

The MS supported solution is to backup the data, format, reload, restore.

Pat Richard, MCSE(2) MCSA:Messaging, CNA(2)

 

[Niksen]

try search acronis, its ALOT faster than partition magic.

brgds Nicolai

 

[markdmac]

I'd create an ASR, then resize your RAID 5 and launch the ASR to get your system partition back.

If the above mentioned utilities work then great, but you will want this backup done anyway just in case something fails during the resizing of the partition. If you don't have the budget for such a program then go with the ASR since that is built in to NTBackup.

I hope you find this post helpful.

Regards,

Mark

 

[twwabw]

I've used Paragon Partition Manager 7 server edition on 3 different 2003 servers with no issues at all. It's a great product, GUI interface, and will work on Server 2003. If you have complete backups, you should be fine. Find it here:

http://www.partition-manager.com/corporate/server/

 

[comtec17]

A clean install is the best...

 

[Roadki11]

I would ghost the whole box to a slaved drive then restore the ghost and resize the partitions on the fly. Ive done this with ghost 2003. If you use ghost compression you should be able to get the ghost image on a 400gig or smaller drive depending on the compressibility of the data.

have fun.