Upgrading Server Hard Drive Using Norton Ghost

Last weekend I undertook the task of upgrading our company server Hard Drive for increased capacity.

The Hard Drive of the server was in mirrored in a Raid 1 array, i.e. 2 Hard Drives of 72 GB each, with only 6 GB allocated to local drive C and the rest allocated to drive D.

Before I began the following were considered important

- All data backed up
- Users informed of the downtime over the weekend
- New Hard Drives (in this case 2 x 300GB SCSI HDD)
- Norton Ghost
- Plenty of time

Below are the steps, in the order I carried out the process of upgrading

- Switched the server off and took out the 72GB HDD in slot 1, and replaced it with the new 300 GB HDD.

- Started up the server, so that new Hard Drive gets recognised.

- Switched off the server again, and rebooted this time with Norton Ghost in the floppy drive. On the Ghost screen, calculated and created a partition of 40 GB for drive C, and the rest about 246 GB, was allocated to Drive D. Began to Ghost from the drive in Slot 0 (i.e. the 72 GB HDD).

- The process was to take a long time, about 20 hours. Therefore, left the process running overnight.

- Returned back the following day, the Ghost process was completed.

- Started up the server, and then moved the drive in slot 0 (the 72 GB HDD) and moved the drive in slot 1(the 300 GB HDD - on which the ghost image was made) into slot 0.

- Rebooted and converted the converted the drive in slot 0 (the 300 GB HDD – on which the Ghost took place) into dynamic from Disk Management in Windows.

- Restarted the server, twice, to pickup and recognise the drives

- Inserted the new 300 GB HDD into slot 1, and restarted again.

- Once the server had booted up, opened up Disk Management, the drive was recognised and therefore synchronised the drive.

- The synchronisation was estimated to take approximately another 20-22 hours.

- The following day, the synchronisation had completed giving 40 GB on drive C and about 246 GB on drive D.