I have a Dell PowerEdge SC1420 with Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition SP2. It has a hardware controller CERC SATA 1.5/6ch which has two hard drives connected to it with a RAID1 configuration. The hard drives are 160GB drives and I am out of space. I am going to replace both of them with 1TB drives. I need help on two things. I need to copy over the old hard drive information keeping system state, data, etc. in tack and setup the two new hard drives in RAID1 configuration. What is the best way to proceed with this and what is the best software to copy all the information from the original RAID1 drives to the new RAID1 drives.
FYI, this server is a Domain Controller and is just a file / print server. Also the drives are partitioned. C Drive - 25GB D Drive - 125GB. The software will need to expand the partitions on the new drives.
The alternative would be to swap one of the drives and re-mirror, then once mirrored, swap the other drive and re-mirror. You will then have the server with no down-time, on new 1TB disks and although you don't have a larger C: drive, you will have lots of free space you can use.
Then you can use Paragon Partition Magic Server to re-size the partitions - which is much cheaper than BESRS.
Paragon Software:
http://www.paragon-software.com/business/pm-server/
Symantec Software:
http://www.symantec.com/business/backup-exec-system-recovery-server-edition