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Is my plan to increase raid drive sizes and change partition sizes workable?

RHurt
Beginner
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I am going to replace the raid drives on my server and wanted to know if my plan will work before I actually attempt it.

I have a server board S1200BTL using ESRT II with 2 1TB SATA drives configured as Raid 1 in slots 0 and 1.

The operating system is Windows Server 2008 R2.

The virtual raid drive is configured with 2 partitions with an operating system partition and a data partition.

I need to add space to the operating system partition and as the drives have been in use for about 2 years l felt is was probably a good time to replace them.

The plan I have developed is as follows:

1. Remove the two existing raid drives (slots 0 and 1) and replace them with new unformatted 2TB drives.

2. Boot to the ESRT bios configuration and create a new raid 1 configuration.

3. Shut down the system, install the original slot 0 drive into slot 3.

4 Insert a bootable DVD with the WD version of Acronis disc Wizard cloning program and clone the original raid drive (in slot 3) onto the new virtual raid drive. This process includes increasing the sizes of the old partitions.

5. Shut down the system, remove the slot 3 drive and DVD and reboot into the Windows Operating System.

Anyone have any thoughts about this working or not?

Thanks

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Edward_Z_Intel
Employee
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Well it's quite possible that the bootable DVD with Acronis doesn't have embedded driver for ESRT2, which means when you boot from that DVD it won't even see the RAID volumes... Before making any changes you can try to boot from that DVD first and check if it detects the existing partition.

RHurt
Beginner
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Great catch. I booted the machine with the Acronis DVD and it does see the virtual drive and its partitions with the correct formats but there is no indication that it knows it is a "raid volume".

I recently used this same process to upgrade the raid drives on a Dell PE T-100 server with a Dell SAS 6/iR raid adaptor and it worked wonderfully.

I guess can give it a try to see if works. If it doesn't work however, is there anything special I will need to do to when I put the old raid drives back in?

Thanks for your help.

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Edward_Z_Intel
Employee
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That's great. Yes you can give it a try. If it doesn't work, simply remove the new drives and connect the old drives to their original positions.

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RHurt
Beginner
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Thanks again.

I'm going to attempt it tomorrow morning. Will report back if it works.

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RHurt
Beginner
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Bad news. As you suspected the Acronis software did not see any of my drives after I installed the new raid drives and inseted my old slot 0 raid dirve in slot 3 and booted to Acronis.

I removed the new raid drives and re-installed the old raid drives ( in their original slots) and rebooted. The system started but the Raid Web server popped up with an error on the drive in slot 0 and automatically started a rebuild.

After about 10 minutes the system crashed (blue screen). Upon rebooting again both drives were marked offline and I couldn't do anything on the subject server to get either of them to boot.

Both drives are accessible when installed on a Windows 8.1 machine i use for utility work so there is no apparent data loss on the drives ( I also have full data backups) but in order to use the larger drives on the server I started the 2 day clean install process of the entire system and applications.

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