Retire hard drive on Windows NT Server 4.0

[Bobot]

Hi all -

I have a customer with a pretty simple setup so I hope someone can give me some pointers to avoid a disaster on this one....

I have NT Server 4.0 SP6a running on hardware dated circa 1999. The system is a standalone server with (2) 8-Gig IDE drives, one drive being a mirror of the first. The customer wants to retire/replace these drives with (2) 40-Gig drives.


My thought process was:

1. Break the mirror
2. Use PowerQuest DriveCopy 4 to duplicate the 8 Gig primary drive image to the new 40 Gig primary drive
3. Bootup under the new 40 gig
4. Partition the extra space
5. Re-generate the mirror to the 40 Gig drives

Sounds simple, but I'm worried about things like the hardware abstraction layer and boot.ini and stuff complaining at step 3 above because I changed the hardware (drives). I'll bet dollars to donuts that if I did this I would get a blue screen of death on bootup.

Please help with any ideas or suggestions as to this process so I can make it as smooth as possible.

Thanks in advance as all your help has been great in the past!

- Bob

 

[hudman]

Hey Bobot,

It sounds like it should work. Just make sure you have a good full backup. I recently upgraded a CPU in an NT server and I thought I would get a similar error with the HAL, but it never caused a single problem. The boot.ini shouldn't be a problem as long as it's a complete copy. Everything should be in the same partitions as the copied drive - just larger. I also asked a question about a Compaq NT server in regards to a hard drive change in a RAID 5 and what would happen if the replacement drive was larger and a different model. The tech rep said it would just use what matched the replacement drive and the rest would be free space. I haven't had to do it yet, but I wanted to know because it's an older server and getting matching hard drives would be impossible if one failed. Good luck!

 

[Bobot]

Thanks Hudman -

The good thing I am coming from Western Digital drives to Western Digital drives, but that initial boot up when you are sitting there waiting for the screen to kick over from text to the desktop is the most stressful thing I deal with when doing changes like this on NT.....

I always make backups and expect it to fail, then if it works I'm happy....hehehe