1st Restore happening in 2 days - wish me luck!

[Richard_Wright_]

Dell PowerEdge 700 server with 4 drives in RAID 5. One drive failed and replacement(s) cause one of the other drives to go offline. So, Dell says to replace all drives and restore...

This is a Domain Controller and Exchange box.

I have not had the opportunity to test a restore before, so fingers are crossed. Before I brought the server up the last time it failed, I wanted to see how far I could get and I was able to start networking, browse to the restore files but did not have a target available. I didn't have the right scsi driver on the floppy but I do now. So, wish me luck!

Any tips?

[Richard_Wright_]

Oh, one more thing. I could not find any references to increasing the partition size. For example, the C: is 50GB but I would like to increase it. I'll keep trying to find the info but if anyone can point me in the right direction I'd appreciate it.

[reza_akhlaghy]

Hi

If you're restoring on exactly same storage tick:

Restore original disk signature
Set Drive Active
Restore MBR

If you can see your drive in recovery environment it should be ok

Goodluck :)

[Richard_Wright_]

Hi Reza. They are 4 brand new drives, same capacity though, but what do you mean by exactly same?

Also, before I restore the C: partition can I have the size larger?

Thanks for telling me the options to check.

Richard

[techno_nerd]

Richard,

There is an option to check that says to resize to fill unallocated space, or use all space. Check that and it will make it larger.

Thanks,

Technonerd

[Richard_Wright_]

Thanks everyone. The restore went well. Except for the time it took, everything is back up and running fine.

The backup took 11hrs 45 min. There is approx 300GB on the server. What I thought was strange is that with a locally attached USB HDD it would take longer than backing up to a \\server\share. Is this normal?

The restore took 10+ hrs. I don't know the actual time because I did not stick around. One lesson learned: DO NOT TAKE THE CD OUT OF THE DRIVE!!! hahaha I chose the option to "reboot when finished" and took the CD out thinking it would try to boot on it. Well, I tried to dial into the server after about 15 hrs to see if it came up so I wouldn't have to drive to the office (40 miles) but when it was not available I figured the restore did not work. So, I drove to the office and saw "insert CD and click ". After I did that the server booted up fine... geez...

So my next question is if there is a way to speed to backup/restore process? Obviously if there was less data that would be one way, but can anyone think of any others?

Thanks again.

[reza_akhlaghy]

Hi Richard,

Good to hear that everything went well. For restore time you must know
that USB hard drives are damn slow! Restoring from another computer
specially with cross cable (gigabit prefered of course) is a faster solution.
you can also consider external scsi or fiber-channel drives.

[Richard_Wright_]

Yeah, I figured that was the issue. When backing up, I use a network share, but because of space I move the files to a USB hdd for safekeeping. I'm trying to get them to invest in a SAN, but... ;)

Thanks for your input.

[Ken_Mahren]

As far as I can see, you can either restore to fill up the disk or restore to original size.

Very frustrating choise. there are many cases I'd like to resize the C partition to a larger size and restore the D drive to fill the remainder. Something that Symantec SHOULD add.

Your only option that I can see is to restore C to origianl size, load a partitioning utiity, resize, create and format D and then copy everything on D from the image backup to the new D.