Need to copy hard drive

[mhayes70]

Hey all, I need some advice.

At my work here we have a Dell Power Edge 2600 server. It has 6 hard drive bays and only 2 are in use at this time. The main drive C: is getting full and I need to get a bigger drive. I have found a 146GB drive from Dell. But, my question is how do I copy everything including all the Windows server OS to this new drive? Is there a software program out there that I need to buy?

Any help is greatly appreciated!!

[harsh]

Rather than replacing the drive, you should consider adding the new drive and moving the data files off of the boot drive. There can be a number of nasty pitfalls to using large boot drives.

Any of the disk partitioning programs should allow you to copy the drive to a partition on a larger drive. I use Disk Director from Acronis as it understands all manner of *nix filesystems.

You need to make sure that the existing drives aren't somehow RAIDed as that can be a real mess.

[mhayes70]

What programs will I know that I can move off the main C: drive to the other drive D:? One problem that I run into, is that any program that I install on the server it always want to install on the C drive and not the D drive?

[harsh]

What programs will I know that I can move off the main C: drive to the other drive D:? One problem that I run into, is that any program that I install on the server it always want to install on the C drive and not the D drive?One of the truly glorious things about Windows 95 and later is that you can't "move" a program without sophisticated software or a deep knowledge of the registry. You are expected to uninstall them from the C: drive and reinstall them elsewhere.

As for your hesitance to install programs elsewhere, don't worry about it. You can install them pretty much anywhere you want using the browse feature when it asks you where you want to install the software.

I caution against installing a lot of junk software on your server as it was not meant to run applications.

[funhouse69]

The only problem here is that any of the software that you would use to copy from drive to drive gets really expensive when you are dealing with a server operating system. This means that you might be looking at a $699 product for backing up the disk instead of a $50 product. I checked the Acronis website and their "True Image" product is $49 but does not support any Server Version OS. The one that does is $699!!!

[harsh]

I checked the Acronis website and their "True Image" product is $49 but does not support any Server Version OS. The one that does is $699!!!True Image is a backup program. In addition to its myriad other faults a Windows boot drive is very difficult to back up. Moving and resizing partitions is what Disk Director is for. The server version is $499.

Obviously, you should do a backup before you attempt anything major like moving or resizing...

The key is to remove and re-install (or not) the application software, not changing out the hard drive. It isn't something that someone who doesn't have intimate knowledge of Windows, servers and thick and thin clients should undertake.

[mhayes70]

Thanks for all your input. I did some checking on our server and I found out that drive C: and D: are actually on the main drive and are partitioned. The other drive is actually a mirrored copy of the main drive.

[dmspen]

If you want to just copy, not make a backup, look at a program called XXCOPY. It's a redux of the old DOS program xcopy. It has many switches that will allow you to do a bit for bit copy of one drive to another.

BTW, it's free!

[harsh]

If you want to just copy, not make a backup, look at a program called XXCOPY. It's a redux of the old DOS program xcopy. It has many switches that will allow you to do a bit for bit copy of one drive to another.XXCOPY, like any other file copy program isn't capable of handling open files. This is of exceedingly limited utility in backing up a server boot drive where there are many files open at any particular time. Even an XP workstation may have dozens of critical files open.