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yessirnosir

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best way to increase size of Raid 1 SCSI array on Dell server with PERC2 & Win2K?

I have two 9 GB SCSI disks in a hardware mirror (RAID 1) controlled by Dell PERC2 controller (in a PowerEdge 1300 Server running W2K).  Array is partitioned into C: and D:.  Both partitions are nearly full, and I would like to replace the two 9 GB drives with a couple of larger, maybe 36 GB drives.  Looking for advice about a step-by-step plan to do this without  W2K reinstallation.   Have Googled this site and others and come up with a couple of approaches, but I've never worked with a server or it's RAID controller before, so I'm not sure if one or the other is easier, quicker, or more likely to succeed.  Would appreciate any input about which is better, or any other suggestions that will make this as quick and painless as possible.

Approach #1:
remove one 9 GB drive
install new 36 GB drive and allow it to rebuild as a 9 GB mirror of other drive
remove second 9 GB drive
install second 36 GB drive and allow it to rebuild as a 9 GB mirror
use partitioning software (boot-it ng recommended elsewhere on this site; but would Partition Magic 8 work?) to resize partitions to use full 36 GB of disk space

Approach #2:
Install temporary IDE drive in system
Use Ghost to image the C: and D: partitions to the IDE drive
Remove the two 9 GB drives, and install the two 36 GB drives
Configure a new RAID 1 array with the two 36 GB drives
Use Ghost to restore the C: and D: partitions, resizing them to use the full 36 GB.

I'm thinking that perhaps Approach #1 is less likely to cause any complications, while approach #2 may be quicker????   When complete, I would really like to be able to boot up Win2K server as if nothing had happened.  Will that be the case?  Or will I have to do something to make it boot/work properly?

Thanks in advance,
Bob.
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rindi
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yessirnosir

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Thanks Rindi:  I'm studying the manual for the SCSI controller, which apparently is a rebranded AMI MegaRaid 466, Dell part number 8540V.  The manual is about 150 pages long, and its a pretty steep learning curve for me.  I see there is a feature to rebuild a physical drive, which seems to be what I need to start with.  There is also an option to designate drives as "hot spares", so conceivably I could put all four drives in my system, designate the two new ones as hot spares, and then take turns failing the original drives, which would initiate an automatic rebuilding process using the hot spares.  

But once I get the two new drives up and running with 9 GB utilized, I'm not sure of next steps.  The manual talks about a view/add configuration option to press F10 and then set the logical drive size, but it isn't completely clear to me that this allows me to resize a previously defined logical drive, or if it just allows me to add a new logical drive in the unused space.  There is also an option in an advanced menu to "reconstruct logical drive" that may be relevant, but there was almost no info in the manual about what that option does.  If anyone has experience with this controller, please advise.

Is it correct that I would need the server version of Acronis Drive Image for this job?  At $699 that's way out of my price range for this little old server!   Maybe the free download would do the job, since this is likely a one shot requirement, but I already own Ghost and despite its warts have used it successfully for years, so was hopeful it would be a suitable tool for this task too.  Is there any reason it won't work?

One concept I'm having trouble with:  does Windows 2000 know or care about the actual disks in my RAID array, or does the hardware controller mask all that, so that I can change the physical hard drives as much as I want without requiring any configuration changes in Windows?  And does it make any difference to Windows whether I follow approach #1 (which maintains the same logical disk throughout) vs approach #2 (which creates a brand new logical disk, albeit with the same drive number)?

Thanks,
Bob
I think acronis driveimage should work with the downloaded trial, you'd have to try that. Even so, the server version may in the long run be worth the price, because it can be used as a backup program while the system is running!

Ghost should work, but there's no guarantee. Officially there's no support for raid controllers, but usually it works. There's another product you could look at, boot-it ng:

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/

Whether Windows 2000 server (there's a difference between the server and the professional versions here) cares about raid depends on how raid is implemented. Usually if you use a real hardware raid controller it doesn't care, everything is handled by the controller and windows just needs the raid controller's driver to function. Some cheap raid controllers, though, aren't strictly hardware raid controllers, and use the PC's CPU to handle the array, and with these windows might have to know something about that. Windows Server versions additionally have builtin software raid possibilities, so you don't necessarily need a raid controller there, although using that isn't advisable.

Because it isn't clear what the controller supports, I'd try making images of your partitions then building a new array from scratch and reapplying the images. You'd then still have your original disks to revert back to...
Definatly with you on ghost rindi, I have had acronis has been soo much better. I have seen the wierdest errors created by ghost. It seems like everytime I use it I run into some kind of problem, where user profiles don't load, or the drive just doesn't boot at all.
Thanks for your suggestions Rindi - at this point I'm leaning towards option #2, using one of your recommended imaging programs instead of Ghost, but I'm still waffling a bit.  I originally got the other idea (approach #1) from this post:  https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/21608584/Upgrade-HDD-in-RAID-1-Array.html and I really liked the idea that the RAID controller was going to do all the heavy lifting for me, and that I wouldn't have to hook up any temporary drives.  I'd sure like to hear from anyone out there who has tried it both ways to help me make up my mind.  

One question:  is one method or the other likely to take longer?  I expect that imaging will be very fast with only 9 GB of data, but I have no idea how long it takes a RAID controller to rebuild a 9 GB mirror.  Presumably if the server isn't doing anything else, it can copy that 9 GB pretty darn fast from one drive to the other.  ???

I have downloaded both the Acronis and the BootIt products, and am going to play with them a bit before deciding whether to use one of them.  I have a workstation with a hardware SATA Raid array that I think I'll use to test both products before trying on the server.  One thing that concerns me about Acronis True Image (besides the price!) is that it appears to be designed to run from within the OS, but I'm trying to avoid putting anything on the server because its OS disk is completely full.  We're only surviving through constant culling of unneeded files.  So I would prefer to just shut the server down, boot from a floppy or CD, make all the changes, and then boot back into Windows with bigger C: and D: drives.   I see that Acronis has a disaster recovery mode that can boot from floppies or a CD, but does that allow me to do everything, i.e. create and restore images, or is it just for restoring?
The first option will take longer to finish, but if your controller is capabable of expanding the array it should need less overall downtime. Also most things won't need much user input.

With acronis you can make a bootable CD that has just the acronis program on it. The disaster recovery option is a hidden partition on the HD to which you put the images of the disks. Being hidden, this partition shouldn't be attackable by an OS causing problems, and the rest of the disaster recovery option will then let you boot into acronis by pressing f11 at bootup, and then you can restore the images from that recovery partition, or you can of course boot your CD and use that to recover from that partition.
I tried a test run with a trial version Acronis bootable CD (using a workstation with hardware RAID), but I get an error message saying that the trial version will only create backups or clone disks from within Windows.  I also did a test with Terabyte's Image for DOS, and that worked fine, as did Ghost 2003 from a bootable floppy.  So now I'm backtracking and thinking about doing this with Ghost after all -- I've used it so many times before, and it's really saved my bacon a couple of times.  The worst that will happen is that the restore doesn't work properly, in which case I will still have my original disks and should only have lost about an hour.  (I'm figuring 9 GB of data will take 18 minutes to back up and 18 minutes to restore, plus some time to physically swap the new drives with the old ones)  Anyway, I have this scheduled for next Friday, the 21st, and will report back and award points after that.  

If anyone else has two cents to add, please jump in.  All comments welcomed!
some final comments to wrap up this thread...

I successfully replaced the two RAID 1 SCSI disks with 2 larger ones using my "Approach #2", i.e. imaging the disks with Ghost and a temporary IDE drive to store the image files.  Thanks Rindi for your input on this.   In the end, I was quite happy with the way Ghost handled the job, but thanks anyway for the references to other products.  I can see that the Acronis products are very well designed and supported.

A couple of details for anyone who might be interested:
-I wasn't sure if imaging the entire disk (with its two partitions) would work, so I created images both ways -- once imaging the whole disk with Ghost's Disk/Image function, and a second time with the Partition/Image option to image each partition separately.  (The disk array was a 2 disk raid 1 array configured as a single logical drive by the raid controller, but set up in Windows 2000 Server as a basic disk with 2 primary NTFS partitions,  C: and D:, with C: the bootable system disk)
-The restore of the whole disk image worked.  I didn't use the images of the individual partitions at all.  While restoring, Ghost prompted me to resize the two partitions to fill up the larger space on the new drive.
-On the first reboot into Windows, I had some mild butterflies because Windows did the "Found New Hardware" thing, and said I would have to reboot the machine to use the new hardware.  Before I rebooted, I opened explorer, and could see the C: and D: drives, but none of the shares appeared to be working.  For about 2 minutes I wondered if the permissions had been corrupted, but after a single reboot the shares were back, and I successfully logged in from a workstation.
-About a day later and a half later, on a Sunday when no one was using the network, there was a serious server error, with an error message that "The DHCP/BINLService has determined that it is not authorized to service clients on this network for the Windows domain mycompany.com"  That basically shut down all user access to the network.  This was discovered Monday morning, and everyone of course jumped to the conclusion that I had fried the server with the disk upgrade.  But after a reboot of the machine, everything was fine, as it has been now for 3 days.  Very strange.  
-Total time to do the disk upgrade could have been as brief as about an hour and a half.  I took more like 3 hours because I did the imaging two different ways, and, ahem, I made a rookie error the first time I placed the SCSI ID jumpers, inadvertantly counting from the wrong end of the jumper block, which cost me about 1/2 hour to figure out what I'd done, and pull the drives back out to fix (jumpers were inaccessible once drives were installed).  Image creation was relatively slow at about 200 MB/min, or about 45 minutes for 9 GB on this 500 MHz Pentium III server.  When I did a trial run on a much newer machine with a SATA array and a 2200 MHz Athlon, I averaged about 800 MB/min, and I was hoping I'd do at least 500 MB/min for the actual job.