Alternate to Norton Ghost

A

Azhar

Fixing stupid since 1972
Joined
Jan 9, 2001
Messages
18,877
Hello folks. Once again I'm turning to you guys for advice or suggestions.

Here's the scenario: Our company's old Poweredge 2800 server has an almost full drive with Windows Server 2003 on it. The drive is a pair of 10k rpm Ultra320 SCSI 33gb in hardware RAID1 mirror array.

Here's what I'm going to do: Replace the 2x 33gb RAID1 drive with 2x 146gb RAID1 drive.

Here's the problem: We have a total of 3 servers. We have no need for more as we are a small company. Of course since I need to replace the operating system drive, I'm going to have to Ghost the drive from the 33gb to the 146gb. The second array group is already occupied by 3x 76gb RAID5 disks. Simply making the 146gb a second channel RAID1 and copying over to the other drive is thus impossible.

Norton sells a Windows 2003 compatible version of Ghost 12.0 Business Solutions that supports RAID at a bare minimum of 5 license at $32 per license.

3 server. 5 license. I don't think so.

Would you guys recommend a different software that does the same thing as Ghost that will support SCSI, hardware RAID, and Windows 2003 Server? It needs to snapshot an image of C:, put the image on D:, then I can swap out the 33gb for the 146gb, then boot the server with the software, and put the image back from D: to the new C:

And !!! most most most importantly !!! it must not screw up :p

What say ye?
 
Why dont you give Drive SnapShot 1.3 a try?

I used it to migrate several raided servers to new disks and worked flawless every time, worth every penny IMO :D
 
lodingi said:
True Image
Click to expand...

Only True Image Server and Enterprise Server works with Windows 2003 Server and they cost $699 and $999 respectively. I think 5 licenses of Norton Ghost at $32 per license is a wee bit cheaper :p

But thanks for the suggestion though.
 
Just an update: Even Ghost Business Solution does not snapshot servers. It acts as a central admin to snapshot domain computers. What crap :p

TrueImage however does snapshot servers.

But, it turned out I didn't need either. I was mislead on the fact that RAID controllers typically allows two array groups, and since we had a RAID1 and RAID5 group on the server already, I thought I wouldn't be able to install a third group.

I was wrong. The PERC 4e/Di integrated controller accepted a third group happily.

So I'm able to continue using the 33gb RAID in addition to the new 146gb RAID. The more the merrier, right? :D
 
When we had to expand our server's system drive, we just used the ghost32 executable and didn't bother with the central admin capabilities. Booted off a Windows PE disc with PERC drivers, imaged the drives. Haven't tried it with a RAID1 drive, but RAID5 worked flawlessly several times.
 
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