Introduction

Preliminary Steps

Performing the Task

Summary

Further Reading and Useful Links

Introduction

This FAQ is not meant for a personal computer with standard IDE or SATA hard disk drives.  Resizing and working with partitions on such computers does not require anything more than standard, inexpensive software such as Partition Manager.  Likewise, installing a new disk on a PC is a snap with Ghost or Acronis.  In fact, I recently discovered a great Open Source utility called gparted (Gnome Partition Editor).  Don't let the Linux part of it be of concern, an ISO can be downloaded for a bootable CD to make using it a snap.

Servers or high end workstations using hardware RAID present a problem because boot disks with partitioning or imaging software cannot access the drives.  Finding and configuring drivers for these boot disks can be frustrating.  The following is my method of imaging and managing partition resizing for servers or workstations with RAID.

Preliminary Steps

Create an Ultimate Boot CD for Windows.  An UBCD will boot a working copy of XP.  During the startup it detects most RAID cards and arrays including the PERC cards on Dell PowerEdge servers.  Don't let the instructions be intimidating, just follow them step by step and you won't be making coasters from your CDR's.  The Further Reading and Useful Links section has a link to the instruction page.

Create a network shared folder on a system or server with necessary permissions to write the image to it.  Place ghost32.exe in it.  If using anything other than Ghost Enterprise version 8 substitute the 32-bit windows executable.

Performing the Task

Allow for plenty of down time.  Depending on the size of the images and network speed this could take some time.  Be sure to have good backups in the event your images do not restore.

1. Insert the UBCD and boot from it.  When prompted enter TCP/IP, computer name, and other network parameters that will be necessary to connect to the share created in the previous step.  If your environment has managed switches be sure to lock the port of the switch and the NIC of the system to the fastest duplex and speed available on both.  This will reduce the time necessary to create the image over the network by eliminated the overhead of speed and duplex negotiations.

2. Verify the UBCD loaded the necessary drivers to 'see' your RAID array.

3. Map a drive to the share.

4. Run ghost32.exe and create images of the drives and partitions that you will want to restore, saving them to the mapped drive.

5. When the images are created, reboot with an XP CD in the drive.  Allow the installation to run as far as the partitioning section.  Delete and create partitions as desired.

6. Repeat steps 1 and 3.

7. Run ghost32.exe, this time restoring the images.

Summary

I have used this process many times with success, but will not guarantee your success.  Familiarize yourself by doing this to a lab server or test machine.  I hope you find it as useful as I have.

Further reading and useful links:

http://gparted.sourceforge.net  Gnome Partition Editor, Open Source partitioning utility

http://www.ubcd4win.com/howto.htm  Instruction page of Ultimate Boot CD's site

http://www.symantec.com/home_homeoffice/products/system_performance/pm80/index.html  Symantec's Partition Magic

http://www.symantec.com/home_homeoffice/products/backup_recovery/ghost10/index.html  Symantec's Ghost

http://www.acronis.com  Acronis products such as True Image and Disk Director

http://www.ultratech-llc.com/KB/?File=DiskPart.TXT  Extensive list of partitioning software

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Schmahl World Computer Assistance, LLC