Image a server, then restore it!

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Yup, thanks for the advice.

I will have to test a few things before I take the plunge and do this

 

I had quick test on my server but Acronis failed. I was having issues with the server though, I was trying to move the data from an IDE drive to a SCSI drive but I was having issues with the SCSI controller to start with.

Going to fire in a second IDE drive and test again.

Cheers for the G partED link, Ive added to it my "potential solution" list.

 

Basically there is an option to move the whole system partition to another empty drive; it reconfigures the MBR as well. After a reboot it threw an error.

When I installed the SCSI drive a few errors were generated when I tried to format it, I think it may have been a problem with the driver for the SCSI card. Going to rebuild the server with two IDE drives as a test...

 

The O\S was installed on the IDE hard drive although there was a SCSI card in the server with no drives. I swapped a drive out of another server and installed it. There was nothing on the drive.

I have removed the drive and now have two IDE drives installed, one hosting the O\S and the other has no data on it.

 

This is my test server, the clients server has a SCSI raid controller with 5 disks in a RAID 5 array.

 

It worked. Made a backup image to the new drive, formatted drive C:, rebooted with the disaster recovery disk and then pulled the image back onto the C: drive.

Now just need to figure out how to do this on the live server. No free disk space slots and there is no USB ports. May have to pull the image over the network or even a DVD, don’t the think the drive will support DVDs or even re-writable CDs, it’s an old server.

Need a coffee now!

 

Just to update my own thread!

Managed to get this done over the weekend, just needed 50000 cups off coffee!

Pulled the plug on the internet connection at 3pm on Friday and which meant all replication changes etc would be backed up at the other sites. Replaced the 100MB switch with a 1000MB one and then installed a PC with a 500MB IDE slave drive to hold the server image.

Took a full image of the server to the PC, was around 140GB when it had completed. Pulled the image onto my spare server and booted it up. It blue screened but after a repair install of the OS everything booted ok and I could log on with no problems.

Crossed my fingers and deleted the partitions on the live server and then pulled the image from the PC and resized the partitions to something that was way more suitable!

Logged onto the server and brought the internet connection back up and allowed the replication and mail routing to kick back in, happy days!

Think I got it all finished around 5 in the morning or something like that!

 

LOL!

@Wizard, finished at 5am Saturday morning so had a sleep when I got home. Still made it out for a few beers on the Saturday night