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UmairSFlag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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Clone and replace Server hard drive to extend storage capacity

Hi,

Our organisation server is running out of storage space and there are no slots left in the server to add more drives. There are only 4 slots in the server and there are 4 physical hard drives are installed. Raid 1 is configured for data storage and processing so only 2 logical drives are in operation. Now I want to replace hard drive with another larger capacity hard drive.

I only want to replace one logical drive without operating system with raid 1. Can you please suggest me how can I clone the data on to new drive? How to clone these drives and in which order I need to replace and install drives and which software is recommended. Also I need your views, is it safe to do as we are only running one server in our organisation and all data is saved on this server.

Please help me with this. I shall appreciate it.

Regards

Umair
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rindi
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Thanks for your prompt reply. I know it's very silly of me but I am new to all this so I am bit reluctant to take this step. My question is when I will be cloning where would I keep the image of the drive? Do I need to remove one of the drives from the bay and replace it with new larger drive and create image on newer one and once it is done replace the one smaller drive with the second new drive and it will automatically mirror the data on the new one.

Is it what you mean? or do I need to keep the image on some other source may be external drive or somewhere else?

I am confused if new drive would not be in the bay how can I create an image on to that?

Regards
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Sorry I forgot to mention server details. It is Dell PowerEdge T605 Server running Windows Server 2008 standard version and has RAID card configured RAID 1.

What other methods can I use and also tell me which is the safest method to clone a hard drive. And sorry if I being silly.
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Thanks again rindi. What I understand is that I will clone the drive to some other location may be NAS or some other external drive. I will then replace the drives from the bay and restore the image on to new drive but do I also need to reconfigure RAID on these ones? And is it easy to configure RAID on new drives ?
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Thanks Rindi ... Can't I configure RAID using DELL OpenManage after installing both drives when one drive already has full data cloned?
I don't think so. Usually creating the array destroys the data.
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Hmm... that's really helpful. You mean I will need to install the new drives and then configure RAID on them. After that I can clone the drives using image clone software to restore.

Can I use the same Dell OpenManage to configure RAID 1 on new drives? And is it any difficult to create new RAID on newly installed drives?
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THANK YOU VERY VERY MUCH ... I WILL NOW TRY IT.
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One last important question... Removing previous physical drives from the server will also destroy the RAID ARRAY 1 configurations? I mean if I remove and then install them back again will they need any configuration settings or will they be ready to use again as they were before?

Removing 2 data drives with RAID Array 1 does not affect RAID on drives with operating system? I mean Physical Drive 1 has 2 partitions C and E whereas second physical drive has only D volume. If I remove drives with volume D will it affect RAID on other drive 1 with volumes C & E?

Reason of this question is, if something gets wrong with clone or new drives, will I still be able to use my older drives by simply installing them without any new settings?

Thanks.
No, the RAID info is kept in the meta data on the disks (or usually it is). So removing the disks won't destroy the array.