[cctalk] Re: OT: Win2K+3 on a Dell Poweredge 2600

On 12/20/22 10:12 PM, Chris via cctalk wrote: It might help us to know what model the Dell server is. That could mean many different things. Aside: Is "iinm" short of "if I'm not mistaken"? It's technically possible, though unlikely, that the RAID is of really small drives, and you may need the aggregate space of multiple drives to do the install. Though I'd be surprised if they are smaller than 4.3 GB drives, and Windows 2003 itself will easily fit in that space. It really depends what the RAID technology is. PowerEdge servers used a combination of PowerEdge RAID Controller (a.k.a. PERC) cards (read: hardware) and / or Windows (read: software) RAID technologies. -- At least from Dell. There are lots of other more esoteric options too. You / we really need to know what /type/ of RAID is used to be able to move forward with any certainty. If it's a PERC and it presents itself to the BIOS as a SCSI card, then chances are decent that you can get (Norton) Ghost to work on the drive. Aside: There's every chance that Ghost will refuse to work on a server OS and require you to use a different version. -- This was the case with PowerQuest's PartitionMagic vs ServerMagic. Further Aside: I'd expect that PQ-SM would at lease see the /logical/ /volume(s)/, even if it was software RAID. I don't think there was much change between NT's software RAID and Windows 2000 / 2003 counterparts. This is assuming that you do the cloning from outside of Windows, which is usually a safe bet. I have routinely used Acronis TrueImage from inside of Windows to backup systems. I believe that such a backup can be used to restore to bare metal. Acronis even has options for -- what I think they call -- disaster recovery that will allow the backup and / or restore process to inject generic drivers into the recovered system so that you can restore to dissimilar hardware. All of this ignores what i consider to be the elephant in the room. -- What is on the server that you care about retaining? Or why don't you just blow it away and do a fresh install of Windows on the drive configuration that you want? Maybe. Probably. Capacity /may/ be an issue. Especially if there's software other than /just/ Windows Server 2003 that you want to retain; e.g. application data. If you're going to install Corel Linux, do you even really care about the Windows installation? There is actually a chance that installing Linux on the spare drive may be one of the better paths moving forward. I say this because it should be possible to make Linux see just about any type of RAID on the system. Chances are extremely good that Linux will see the PERC -- if that's what it is -- as well as Microsoft Dynamic Volume -- if it's software RAID inside of Windows. At least I think Linux's Dynamic Volume support includes software RAID. You probably have many more tools available in Linux to image the logical volume(s), whether they be hardware and / or software. PartImage comes to mind. Once you have the image, you can then do away with the RAID as it exists and do whatever you want with the rest of the drives. -- Grant. . . . unix || die