Using Ghost on DC's

[Alan Morris]

We have a client with 3 DC's each with hardware raid (5) disks that
were configured as one logical drive split into 3 partitions, sysvol,
pagevol and datavol. In the original setup the sysvol was set to an
inadequately small size and this has only recently become apparent. We
are considering ways to redress the issue. Our favourite option is to
ghost the sysvol and datavol partitions on each server (in turn) to 2
image files on a network share, repartition the raid logical drive
(maintaining the correct number of partitions and drive letter etc
etc.) and then restore the sysvol and datavol images.

Are there any issues concerned with imaging a DC (that is part of a
domain with multiple DC's). One previous attempt at this in a lab
environment was not sucessful - resulting in LSASS errors after boot
on the server involved, followed by logon/logoff loop - a situation
that I never fully debugged.

Another approach is to use something like server magic to simply move
the existing partitions, but even with this approach I would prefer to
have an image to fall back to in case of failure.

Any ideas/suggestion warmly welcomed.

 

[seth]

i'm not surprised it failed in the lab environment
i would strongly suggest not using that type of software for that purpose
since u have other dc's i would work on moving the data off that is needed
to somewhere else, demoting the server, then reconfigure the partitions and
reload the os
if this were a workstation i would be favoring using those third-party
tools, but in this situation i would discourage it

 

[Jetro]

Clone the whole drive. After reimaging you might need to boot into Directory
Services Restore Mode. In case of pagefile error you can delete
HKLM\System\MountedDevices remotely and reboot.

 

[Alan Morris]

Seth, thanks your input on this, can you explain to me why it fails?

 

[Alan Morris]

Jetro,

Thanks your input. Unless we use server magic or equivalent for the
actuakl resize, then cloning the drive would simply give us a backup
and not allow us to resize the partition on a restore.

Yes/no?

Alan

 

[Jetro]

No.

Ghost compatibility with dynamic partitions
http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ghost.nsf/docid/2000062209523525
Excerpt:
"...Because you can select all partitions on the source disk when performing
a partition-to-image cloning operation, a disk-to-image clone is necessary
only in unusual circumstances, and is only applicable for backup purposes.
....To clone the entire disk, perform a partition-to-image operation and
select all partitions on the source disk."

This is true for hardware RAID indeed.