PowerEdge 2600 Upgrade Question

[dberg35]

I have a PowerEdge 2600 and I am looking to upgrade it. Here are the current specs.
Win 2003 Standard
4 Gigs Memory
3-36 Gig HD in a RAID 5

I am looking to Swap the drives for new 160 gig, do I need to replace all three and besides ghosting the C dirve what would I need to do to make this swap of is there doc's out there to review?

 

[NickFerrar]

You could do it by failing and replacing one drive at a time, make sure the replacement 160GB drive has finsihed building before failing the next.

After that's done you'll be left with the small RAID-5 set which you can then expand via the PERC or through Dell OpenManage.

Once that's done you need to expand the volumes in Windows. Any non system drives you can use diskpart (I think it's on the resource kit) but for the system drive you'll need to use a 3rd app (I use Paragon Partition Manager personally).

 

[nikos232]

I posted this reply to a Compaq user on this forum, maybe it will help you also.

I am really not sure Ghost will recognize the RAID HBA.
The best issue is to use NTBACKUP (>start >run >ntbackup) and use "backup entire system" to an external drive (prefer an IDE or SCSI drive), create recovery diskette (will ask you a diskette at the end of backup). Then install RAID controller, drives etc...,and create logical volume.

You will need to proceed as you will reinstall windows, but press F2 when loading Windows install interface "Press F2 to launch Automatic System Recovery" , insert the recovery diskette you previously created then it will recover the system copy you made on the backup drive.

You may need to press F6 (specify third party drivers) after press F2 if your HBA is a new or recent card, thus to insert driver disk you got with your HBA...

Caution!
The newly created logical drive MUST have same or larger capacity as original system drive.
Allways use identical drive models, size, model numbers, and vendors to create RAID volumes.

Good luck

 

[dberg35]

Thanks all, now trying to convince the owner to make these purchases.