emergency hard drive replace with Win2K SBS

[Bitsbucket]

I have a customer, Has a Dell Power Edge 1300 out of warranty as of 3 months
ago, started with 5 users now he's up to 12, I am in favor of a new server,
but, until then here is my problem: (oh, and I did not install this beast, I
found it this way)

I have 3, 9 gig SCSI drives, configured to RAID 5 (hardware) Drive letters
are Cboot/windows) Drive e: (data storage) Drive M: (Exchange data) What I
find odd is that both C and M drives have exactly the same free amount of
space left, 133 Mb yes, that is mega bytes. I need to do something about
this ASAP. I have almost no SCSI or RAID experience. I did not sell, setup,
or install the server. This is how I found it. I need a quick down and dirty
solution to give me some breathing room. While decisions are made.
I just talked to Dell support and we came up with this, tell me what you
guys/gals think, Install a plain vanilla IDE controller, Install a 120 gig
IDE drive, use drive image/ghost/PM8 or some imaging program to image the
array to a single IDE drive of sufficent capacity (like 120) to make more
space available, then stretch the partitions to 3 equal sizes. This would be
a temporary solution, until I can figure out what to do, wheather to replace
the whole server, or replace the RAID drives with drives of a bigger size. I
know the IDE solution gives me no redundancy, but it would be temporary. (
or maybe not if I get a mirroring card and add another 120!)
Do you think that would work?
Thanks a million
Bitsbucket

 

[Michael Hawes]

I have a customer, Has a Dell Power Edge 1300 out of warranty as of 3

months ago, started with 5 users now he's up to 12, I am in favor of a new
server, but, until then here is my problem: (oh, and I did not install this beast, I
found it this way)

I have 3, 9 gig SCSI drives, configured to RAID 5 (hardware) Drive letters
are Cboot/windows) Drive e: (data storage) Drive M: (Exchange data) What I
find odd is that both C and M drives have exactly the same free amount of
space left, 133 Mb yes, that is mega bytes. I need to do something about
this ASAP. I have almost no SCSI or RAID experience. I did not sell, setup,
or install the server. This is how I found it. I need a quick down and dirty
solution to give me some breathing room. While decisions are made.
I just talked to Dell support and we came up with this, tell me what you
guys/gals think, Install a plain vanilla IDE controller, Install a 120 gig
IDE drive, use drive image/ghost/PM8 or some imaging program to image the
array to a single IDE drive of sufficent capacity (like 120) to make more
space available, then stretch the partitions to 3 equal sizes. This would be
a temporary solution, until I can figure out what to do, wheather to replace
the whole server, or replace the RAID drives with drives of a bigger size. I
know the IDE solution gives me no redundancy, but it would be temporary. (
or maybe not if I get a mirroring card and add another 120!)
Do you think that would work?
Thanks a million
Bitsbucket

What sizes are the partitions at present? What is size of pagefile? If D
has the most space you could move pagefile to D. You may have problem
running from IDE drive as W2000 may not like the change of hardware. You
should have 18Gb of storage at present, how much more do you want? If you
used Ghost to copy C, D & M to a 20GB ide drive you could add a 4th 9Gb
drive and get 27Gb of storage and then ghost back to the new drive array.

Mike.