Ghosting Windows 2000 Server from a Dell PE2400 to Dell PE2650

[cruzd]

Has anyone ever successfully performed dumping a Win 2K image from one Dell Poweredge server to a different model Poweredge? Both running RAID 5, and different types of PERC. In my case, I'm trying to dump an image from PE2400 to a PE 2650. Everytime I boot up, I get a BSOD on the 2650, that says inaccessible_boot_device during the Win2k splash screen.

By the way, I'm using Symantec Ghost 2003.

 

[IThead]

Try using TrueImage for server... Trueimage will recognize raid drives. their website is

http://www.acronis.com

 

[ntinlin]

Probably the PERC that is causing the trouble. W2K does NOT like going to a system with a different disk controller.

2 options I think.
1 is to try installing the driver for the 2nd PERC before you create the image, MS mention that in a Q article about moving W2K between systems.

2nd which I have done on Compaq when I made a big boob was to boot system using recovery console and copy the raid driver across from floppy disk.

i.e. if current driver is perc.sys and new driver is perc2.sys rename perc.sys to something else for safety and then copy perc2.sys to perc.sys.
Reboot and W2K should use that driver.

Hope this helps
Neill

 

[DanielUK]

I would like to know if this works as I'm busting a gut to setup an offsite backup DC just in case our DC and secondary DC falls down. I'd rather I had a server image that I could simply reinstate, and get working on another machine of different architecture. I have two Dell PowerEdge servers (a 1400SC and a 1600SC) both using raid1 with different size hard drives/processor speeds etc

Dan

 

[DanielUK]

Also, just went to the Acronis website where it mentions preparing a win2k image. It starts to talk about sysprep but AFIK sysprep doesn't work on servers -how does it get round this?

Thanks

Dan

 

[cruzd]

Thanks ntinlin! I was sidetracked with our Sharepoint server's CPU biting the dust. I gotta fix that, then I could get back to testing out Ghost. Thanks for the advice. Will let you know how it turns out.

 

[cruzd]

That didn't work. The PE2400 uses mraid35x.sys drivers for its PERC, and the PE2650 uses perc2.sys. I went into recovery console, renamed the original driver, copied the new driver and renamed to mraid35x.sys. No luck. Still getting "inaccessible_boot_device" error BSOD.

I can't really test your first suggestion since the source server is in production.