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I am in the process of migrating all the data from one (1 TB) volume (not C:) on an AD server to a new 4 TB one. I have copied all the data including the FolderRedirection and Profile stuff as well as some large shared folders.

There are about 25 shares pointed to the drive E: (the 1 TB one), all with complex permissions setup. I have copied all the data to the same folder structure on my currently G: (the 4 TB one) volume.

What I am looking to do is to change the drive letter assignment for E: to, for example, H: then change the drive assignment of G: to be E: so that all the existing shares remain but pointing to the data on the new drive.

In testing on Windows 7 this process works fine, however I want to know if anyone has tried this on Server 2008 R2?

Given this server is an AD controller and i am working remotely i don't want to crash AD in the process of doing this but I need to make the swap over the weekend and I am running out of time.

Any one tried this before?

SimonJGreen
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JTotham
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2 Answers2

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Looks like you can, you just have to restart the "Server" service after making the switch.

SimonJGreen
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  • Cheers, that the sort of confidence I needed to get on with it. Didn't want to be spending my whole Sunday night trying to fix a server i had broken. – JTotham Mar 11 '12 at 18:32
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It will work fine with changing the drive letters. Something to bear in mind is that a directory copied with robocopy or xcopy is not a perfect copy of the original.

If you are replicating a directory to another machine using dfrs or have stuff in alternate file streams, then these are not copied. dfrs will rereplicate everything in a replicated directory.

If you use windows backup to backup and restore the directories from one disk to another, then all the acls, the alternate file streams... everything, will be exactly as the original.

If these are simple shares and you aren't bothered about restoring the security by hand and that the AV will probably rescan everything, then xcopy/robocopy will work just fine.

Ian Murphy
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