System Receovery for SBS used to migrate SBS from an old Dell sever to a new one?

[Swiftor]

System Recovery looks like the ideal canidate for backing up our SBS, but it also looks like it might be great for migrating the current SBS 2003 install from a Dell PowerEdge 2950 to a rack mounted Dell PowerEdge 2950 III, which to my understanding are very different machines.  Our current server looks like it may be on it's last leg.

Would System Recovery do the job?  Anything else I should be aware of? I see some posts mentioning issues with RAID.

Thanks

[David_F]

You may want to review the following two links; these links may have changed but they are referring to a firmware update that you want to be sure the 2950 system is at or has exceeded.

http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz&releaseid=R138547&SystemID=PWE_2950&os=WNET&osl=en&deviceid=11598&devlib=0&typecnt=1&vercnt=3&formatcnt=6&libid=1&fileid=185345

 http://ftp.us.dell.com/bios/PE2950_BIOS_WIN_1.2.0.EXE

Historically for this specific system, I recommend testing the recovery CD to be sure that proper network access can be obtained while in the recovery environment along with the ability to see the disk arrays.

If you do choose to perform the a restore, in many cases where customers had difficulties in migrating a system to a 2950 all that was needed to do to successfully restore the image was to zero out target drive, wiping the first track, and not using the restore option, "Restore original disk signature" in the process.

[Mark_Valpreda]

I for one hope this works well. I have to migrate our SBS from a Dell 2600 to a 2900 III. I will obviously be doing testing! One thing I get from David F's post is that if I can boot from the recovery CD and see the array and the network, I'm golden?

[David_F]

There is a known issue when attempting to migrate SBS 2003 recovery point image from a Dell sever to a another system. With BESR 8.5 choose to hold down the SHIFT key when selecting the Restore Anyware option. A sub-menu will appear, uncheck all three boxes that are present. This will allow the system to be retargeted though the Dell's mini-setup wizard will not be lauched.