| I'm working on one of the background servers for tt.NET and have an issue I've spent a couple nights not being able to resolve on my own. We have a 2k3 Server (yeah yeah yeah *nix people, I don't want to hear about it) on SP2 who's boot partition is NTFS on a RAID and has become too small. I've gone down multiple paths and cannot get a solution that gets me to point be of being able to expand the partition. There's a lot more room on the RAID to be had since we've deleted some now unneeded partitions. I've spent hours on the internet reading about half assed ways of getting this done and then contradictory information that says you're F'ed if you try that. At least they all start with 'back up your data'. There's 1 real path to go down, but I can't make it work. I've added an IDE drive to do a complete clone of the partition to from a boot disk and then be able to resize/delete & recreate the RAID partition. I recall Ghost would do a clone/expand in a single pass which is what I need to do really. Unfortunately.... Issues to work around, etc.: 1. Well, the boot disk is the boot disk, so it's not like I can just go to the disk manager MSC and click extend.
2. Boot partition is NTFS.
3. Boot partition is on a SATA RAID which seems to require drivers to be installed to be recognized by most any bootdisk software. I do have these drivers in apparently GUI & text versions for this purpose.
4. I've got Ghost 14 to boot up (which BTW, WTF happened to Ghost being able to clone drives/partitions?? it's backup software now), but it doesn't have the RAID drivers I need on the bootable CDR, and it's licensed and installed on the laptop I'm working off of. Regardless, it doesn't seem to be the product it used to be.
5. I've got Ghost 2001, but it blurts out errors on the NTFS check. I'm assuming NTFS has advanced over the years? Didn't think this had changed. Anyway, nervous about using it if it reports errors immediately. Probably has to do w/ 2k3.
6. I've got parition magic 8, but they explicitly say it's not for use with Server OSs. Not sure if it matters, but again this is the boot/OS disk and I really don't want to F anything up or lose anything. I don't have a lot of time to waste on this now.
7. Downloaded Acronis for the trial period. They say there's no limitations on this thing during the trial, but I've found several. Anyway, I can boot from an ISO it made for me and amazingly it recognizes the RAID. I started paying attention to what it was going to do and it sounds like it wants to do a backup, not a clone. I don't really need a backup, I need a clone so if S hits the fan I can at least have a working server. Just like Ghost 14, you have to have some client software to read the file it creates. I just want a simple solid clone file per file of the original... none of this proprietary container stuff.
8. nLiteOS/BartPE.. They really don't get me where I need to get to or I'm missing something. I did DL & mess with both of them to see what they would do.
9. I can boot from either floppy or CD/DVD.. I don't think I can boot from USB.
10. profit. Obviously I haven't made it here yet.
Anyway, please click the car below to take this off-line if you have been down this road before and know what the hell you're talking about. I'm dangerous at best and my clock is ticking to get this behind us.
Thanks in advance for helping out the site.
Later
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07:02:18 08/20/10
