Migrating to new HDDs

Question

I am running a W2k3 Server on a software raid 1 using two old PATA drives. I now want to replace them with two new SATA drives. What's the easiest way to go about this? Since uptime isn't really an issue at this point, I was thinking about breaking the array, installing the new drive, and rebuilding it; then remove the other PATA drive, replace it and rebuild once again. Are there any good reasons (other than it probably taking forever) not to do this?

I know I could also use something like Acronis TrueImage but I don't really feel like shelling out money for this seemingly trivial migration :-)

Answer 1

Your idea sounds fine. I would take out disk 0 and cable disk 1 to where disk 0 was, then reboot. Assuming it boots fine keep disk 0 somewhere safe as if it all goes pear shaped you just put the original disk 0 back.

JR

Answer 2

Sounds worth a go provided that your RAID controller supports a mix of PATA and SATA drives of potentially different sizes in the same array.

Answer 3

You could use some Linux LiveCD like SystemRescueCD to copy from a PATA disk to a SATA disk. Added bonus, when done you could resize the partitions on the new (probably bigger) disk.

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/sda

Is all you need : )