Question

Ghosting a disk and keeping NTFS shares

Asked by: kiwistag

I've tried several times in a VMWare ESX guest to ghost one virtual disk to another for a Server 2003 guest as some roles have been moved off and there is wasted virtual disk space of over 200GB. The partition on the guest has been shrunk to 72GB and another virtual disk has been created to ghost to.

However when I do ghost the disk over & restart the server with the new virtual disk in place it doesn't automatically map it tot the correct drive letter nor restate the drive shares. It seemed to always work for me on a physical server but not this one.  
The reason why I'm not just reinstating the shares is that there are about a dozen or so and have different complexities of share settings.

Is there some way of even just backing up the share data and remapping them or some other step to make it default to the disk the way it should?
Alternatively (although it's always seemed messy in the past) I have tried to resize the virtual disk but it only seems to work best expanding, not shrinking!

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Asked On
2009-11-05 at 13:49:39ID24876240
Tags

Windows Server 2003

,

Ghost

,

VMWare ESX 3.5

Topics

Windows 2003 Server

,

VMware

Participating Experts
3
Points
500
Comments
6

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Answers

 

by: leewPosted on 2009-11-05 at 14:02:42ID: 25754544

Test this, but you should be able to backup the share information (If I'm understanding you correctly) by exporting the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\lanmanserver\Shares and then re-importing it into the rebuild system.  (Just make sure the physical drive letters match up before doing so and then reboot).

 

by: subliferPosted on 2009-11-05 at 14:09:11ID: 25754596

Is this strictly a data partition you're working on rather than a boot partition?  If thats the case, you can do this to retain ntfs permissions but would have to redo the shares: create a new VDI the size you want, attach it, robocopy your files, redo your shares, delete/detach the old VDI.

If you want to try to keep shares and all then you may need to do this with the server offline so that after you ghost your image you can delete the old VDI after getting all the details from it (in XenServer we have UUIDs to identify different components, I'm sure VMWare has something equivalent) then make sure you get all you details set correctly on the new VDI before you start it back up.

You may also want to try a different "ghost" app.  I've had a lot of luck with Clonezilla.

 

by: za_mkhPosted on 2009-11-06 at 07:14:22ID: 25759780

You could try VMware converter to clone the disk. When doing this, you are given the option of making the volumes bigger or smaller. IF you do this, then would not lose any share info? I could be misunderstanding the question though..

 

by: kiwistagPosted on 2009-11-09 at 11:21:42ID: 25779051

Thanks - it is already virtualised but I'll try some of the solutions this week.

 

by: kiwistagPosted on 2009-11-15 at 17:49:01ID: 25827386

Solution: After ghosting and re-mapping the drive I had to restart the "Server" Service to reset the lanmanager shares to the assigned drive. Unsure why a reboot didn't bring this back up.. I can only assume that the shares were cleaned up due the drive being marked as missing.

 

by: kiwistagPosted on 2009-11-15 at 17:50:01ID: 31650762

The solution provided was part of the method to ensure that shares were kept.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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