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My PowerEdge 2900 server currently is a windows server 2003 thats configured as a RAID 5 Using PERC 6/i Integrated with 3 750GB Disks. Whats the best way or, the order of steps to upgrade it to windows server 2008 R2 with RAID 1+0 Using PERC 6/i Integrated and 6 750GB disks?

shilezi
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    Rebuild it from scratch. – HopelessN00b Mar 19 '13 at 13:41
  • Thanks HopelessN00b, I am rebuilding it from scratch. The server is a 32bit Archi. I was hoping for a step by step process as I have never configured raid before now. – shilezi Mar 19 '13 at 13:55
  • Oh, you can find that in the manual, but there's really nothing to it. I don't remember the PERC6's off-hand, but it's much like any other RAID controller - delete the existing array, select all the disks, and configure them into a single RAID 10 volume. Then pop in your Server 2008R2 disk and install. Nothing to it. – HopelessN00b Mar 19 '13 at 14:03
  • Ha, so to configure the Raid array on the 2k3 R2 OS first then, upgrade/fresh install to OS to 2k8 R2. Thanks once again, @HopelessN00b. I don't do it till next month. I'll update this once done. – shilezi Mar 19 '13 at 16:01
  • Reconfiguring the array will destroy anything on the array. You won't be able to configure it from within Windows 2003, unless 2003 is not accessing volumes on that array. You'll probably need to configure the array using the boot-time utility. – Jonathan J Mar 20 '13 at 21:40

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Rebuild it from scratch. You'll need to format the array to reconfigure it anyway, so at that point, I'd install Server 2008 R2 fresh and re-do it by hand.

In addition to being the cleanest way, this might be the only possible way, depending on your version of Windows 2003. If it's 32 bit, there is no upgrade path and you need to install fresh.

HopelessN00b
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  • Thanks. Ended up configuring for RAID 5 as I could not use RAID 1+0 since my PERC 6/i Integrated controller only went that high. – shilezi Mar 25 '13 at 18:21
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You don't mention your own 2003 installation, but 2003 is available as 32-bit and 64-bit.

It may well be worth mentioning, that 2008 R2 is available only as a 64-bit installation, and it cannot upgrade a 32-bit install of 2003 (or a 32-bit install of 2008). You can however, upgrade 64-bit versions of previous Windows installations.

Snellgrove
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