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A client of ours has a server running Windows that is installed on a PERC S300 software RAID.

We want to upgrade this to a larger capacity, so we are also upgrading to a hardware RAID card (PERC H700).

Although we have backups of the server, we wanted to know if was possible to take an image of the Windows installation (using something like Ghost) and then restore the image to the hardware RAID.

The issue I am particularly thinking of is Windows looking for the Software RAID when it no longer exists? How would we combat this?

What other issues could arise?

Never done anything like this as normally would rebuild server, but in this instance, this isn't the best plan!

MadHatter
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neildeadman
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1 Answers1

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Ghost's a tricky one as it is aware to some extent of the underlying disk layout, so although it's a great option (I use it myself) I'd say there was a maybe 80% change it'll work. Whereas if you use Windows own, quite stupid, backup system I know for a fact that it doesn't have a clue about the underlying structure so I believe will be more likely to work.

Either way you're going to want to take your time with this so if I were you I'd tell everyone the server will be down for a full day, maybe longer and do both types of backup. Ideally you'd try to restore the data to a totally different set of disks so you can fallback to the originals but I appreciate you may not have that option, still you could always pickup a cheapo single disk and see if either backup could restore to that as a test before wiping the original disks, I'm sure you could rustle up one of those right?

Chopper3
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  • Thanks for the reply. Will wait and see what else is out there and then if no other answers are worthy, will mark yours as the answer! – neildeadman May 10 '12 at 10:31