BESR 8.5 Restore Image to larger disks

[markharper]

I intend to change the RAID 1 array in one of our servers Saturday and replace the 2 disks with larger capacity drives. The array has just one  primary partition and the new disks will remain the same. I have already installed the server operating system to the new disks and BESR and the server can boot from this new array to save time and will recover my computer from an image backed up Friday night. It is a local domain controller so I will need a full restore to the new disks. No hardware is being changed so the drivers etc are the same. To enable this I have one question - do I need to tick "check" enable - re size disks after restore, restore original drive signature (presumably so you do not have to re-activate) and make drive bootable?
I would have normally used the "copy drive" facility but the server is a 1U unit and has only enough space for 2 disks so I cannot add another 2 and create a second drive.
I must say that if there was a request it would be the facility within the program to recognize external disks and be able to use them as second system disks. The reason for this is that I want a working raid array as a spare set so in the event of a total disk failure and I am not on site one of the employees can simply replace the two disks with the spare set and re-boot the server. This would at least enable them to carry on functioning until a full restore of files can be done. It would also help with disk rotation.
Regards

[marcogsp]

Below is a screen cap of the the options I typically use in similar scenarios.  I've always had good luck doing it this way:




There is really no advantage to having the OS and BESR installed on the target drive since you will have to use the System Recovery Disk to restore the partition containing the OS anyway.  BESR will not restore over a partition you are already booted to.  I don't know what you are using for a drive controller, but I would advise against swapping with drives already preconfigured for a RAID array, and restoring to the already configured partitions.  The best way to insure that the drives and RAID controller are in sync with each other is to have the RAID controller build the array and then restore to the newly created array.  If you proceed with your original plan, be aware that there could be problems down the road with striping errors or worse.

As for your absentee DR plan, same cautions, but with a different twist.  How would you insure that the person inserting the drives is doing so in the correct order?   To those of us who do this for a living, it may seem straightforward, but the unskilled person may get truly confused.  Try instructing someone how to tie their shoes over the telephone and you will see what I am getting at,  This is something we all supposedly know how to do, but trying to instruct someome to do it without visual cues is a lot harder than you would think.

[markharper]

Hi Thanks for the reply,
Because of problems I had trying to do a restore from the recovery disk in the past the only way I could successfully restore the system was to do a clean install of windows and install the BE SR and do the updates. Then I told it to restore my computer and browsed the the image file and selected the options. It then asked me to shut down the server and reboot with the recovery CD. Once that had Been done it read that a recovery was planned and did it automatically without having to browse fro the file and map drives etc and also no custom driver was needed
Previously when trying a restore from the CD several things when wrong including not being able to boot from the array and unless the raid is formatted by windows it will not see the drive in the first place. Formatting take longer to do that installing the OS so I might as well also install Windows. The restore process over writes the drive anyway but I do not need to map and install drivers etc and also with a clean install I can check the system out for errors or failures from within windows before the restore.
It was the question about the disk size that I was wondering on as some posts seem to point out that under certain circumstances this is not required.
The recovery plan is quite simple. 2 disks 2 slots (front hot swap) disk 1 into slot 1, disk 2 into slot 2 when the server is turned off. The raid controller will recognize the array and continue to boot to the OS. The old disks would be removed and examined on a different machine. One the server has booted they then would have access to the exchange server etc as they have roaming profiles and the mail boxes are stored on the exchange server rather than PST's on the local machines. I know some files and maybe a user account would not be restored because the bootable array will contain out dated Active directory schema but it would get them working again until I could do an authoritative restore or a restore from the previous nights backup when I arrive on site (normally within an hour of a request) I do not work on site full time and some staff are familiar with replacing disk drives to the carriers and also being able to totally swap the web servers to another identical machine in the event of hardware fail.