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Restoring server to new hard drives

I recently bought 2 320gb hard drives for our SBS2003 server to replace it's existing older drives. I firstly did a complete backup using Acronis True Image Server 9 but could not restore the server onto the new drive. I connected one of the new drives to the server and ran True Image's restore program within it's windows GUI which succesfully restored to the new drive but when I take out the old drive and just have the new drive SBS2003 doesn't boot. I have also tried using True Image's bottable media to restore to a new drive outside of windows but it doesn't even find any of my SATA drives so that wasn't going to work. I have also mirrored the old drive with the new drive and then removed the old drive to see if windows would allow me to boot to the mirror but that wouldn't boot either.

Any suggestions? At the moment I have the restored data on one of the new hard drives but it will not boot.

Cheers

Kelly

Olaf De Ceuster

Do image to new drive remove old drive, boot from SBS CD 1 and run a windows repair, press F6 to add your HDD Drivers.
Hope that helps,
Olaf

gukacell

ASKER

Thanks for the suggestion. I have done what you've suggested and I get a DOS window which asks me to enter in commands for Windows Repair. Was it supposed to repair automatically or are there some commands I need to enter to get Windows to make the new drive active?

Thanks

Kelly

Olaf De Ceuster

You might have to recreate the Master boot record (MBR).
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/325375
Olaf

manicsquirrel

In my experience with Acronis, this issue usually has to do with the boot.ini file. Let's say I have a factory install of SBS from Dell. Dell has a tiny maintenance partition on the OEM setup. I never imaged that, just the main partition. Little did I realize that the boot.ini was set to boot to the second partition. After restoring the image to a new drive the operating system was now on the first partition.

I normally resolved this by connecting the drive to another machine and editing the boot.ini. If I still had problems I booted into the repair console and fixed the MBR.

DRZCM

Also make sure that the new boot disk is assigned to the same drive letter that the old one was.

DR. Z

gukacell

ASKER

There isn't a maintenance partition as I built the server from scratch. When using Acronis and restoring the data to another hard drive whilst within windows it asks you to assign a drive letter to the new partitions being created. Unfortunately, I cannot assign the same drive letters that the server is currently using on the old drive which I still need to allow me to boot and to restore. I can restore the drives without assigning a drive letter so if I did that how could I then assign it to C drive once it has restored.

Kelly

Olaf De Ceuster

SBS needs to be on C:
Put server 2003 from disk 1 on C: with no other drives in the system and use an SBS backup to restore.
You might still have to do a restore.
Olaf

gukacell

ASKER

I really don't think Acronis is actually going to allow me to do this. Does anyone have any suggestions for a good backup/restore program that will allow me to backup the original drive and restore to the new drive?

Kelly

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Olaf De Ceuster

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