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Ok, so the situation I have is this. I've got a couple of Dell PowerEdge 2950's that are running out of drive space on the boot volume, they have a perc 5/i hardware Raid Controller. I've bought 4 500GB drives and my goal is to migrate the partitions from the original 160GB drives over to the 500GB Drives and also resize them at the same time.

What I've tried:

  1. Had to set up a Raid Array for the 2 500GB drives in the raid bios.
  2. Used Gparted to clone and resize the partitions. Seemed to go OK, no errors, etc.
  3. Shutdown redefined the 2 500GB drives as the boot Virtual disc, got a non-system disk error, I expected boot problems though.
  4. Started up the recovery console from the server 2003 r2 install disk.
  5. ran fixboot and fixmbr
  6. Still failed, re-ran the recovery console ran fixboot, fixmbr and bootcfg /rebuild. rebooted and failed.
  7. At this point I stuck the original drives back in and just booted the servers back up.

Has anyone done anything like this? Am I missing something? Is the right way to go about this just to back up and install windows fresh on the new drives followed by all the the support apps/etc? Any help is appreciated and thanks for reading my wall of text.

f1gm3nt3d
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3 Answers3

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Gparted just copies a partition without the boot sector information. I always found that copying an entire disk with dd first and running gparted later to resize the partition and filesystem worked less trouble-prone - it does copy the boot sector and ensure that the partition table is really the same as on the source (including the "active" bit for the boot partition).

fixboot and fixmbr would not have your partition "active" bit set - I believe this will be your problem. You can use Linux fdisk to fix that.

the-wabbit
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syneticon-dj is dead on. I often relate a story where I cloned a drive on a domain controller with Ghost 2003 a few years back. It booted, but I could not login due to some security failure. I re-cloned it with the -ia switch. That forces a sector by sector copy, so it gets everything.

KCotreau
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KCotreau method has worked many times for me on a Win2k3SBS that is a domain controller. I have taken 20GB disk and swapped them for 200GB disks using Ghost 2003. Just make sure your bios supports the larger disk sizes!

Vescovo
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