Need advice: Boot-from-SAN back to Direct-Attached Storage

Question

For reasons beyond my control, we need to move a boot-from-san server back to direct-attached-storage. All of it's drives are on the SAN. I'm looking for any advice, recommendations and/or potential gotchas for this process.

The hardware will remain the same (HP DL380 G4), aside from adding new disks and setting up logical drives. OS is Windows 2003 SP2.

My current idea is to boot into BartPE and use Ghost to copy the boot-from-san C: drive, down to the local C: drive. And then rinse and repeat for D: and E:. I understand the biggest gotcha is making sure the target drives can accomodate the size of data coming from the source drives, which we plan to do.

Any advice or warnings is greatly appreciated. (If it makes any difference, it's a Compellent SAN.)

Answer 1

1. backup everything, test the backup
2. connect the DAS, make sure windows can see it (SCSI/SAS HBA drivers installed)
3. ghost/acronis/dd from a linux livecd from the SAN to the DAS
4. reboot (you might need to set the active partition flag)

another way - backup the server, reinstall on DAS, restore longer, but safer

Answer 2

Sounds like a good plan. My advice is:

Test and make sure that everything works before blowing away the SAN disks.

Answer 3

I've done this exact thing the other way around, shouldn't be a problem at all doing what you suggest. Good luck.