Nortons Ghost & HP LH4

[Wayne Gallagher]

HP tech support have advised me that I cannot use Nortons Ghost to take an image of my system partition then restore it after my project as follows.

Our LH4 has 2 x 18 GB drives in a RAID 1 hardware mirror, partitioned as 1 x 8 GB which has up till now been our S:\ (system partition), and a second 1 x 10 GB partition which has up till now been our T:\ (data partition).

We have added, 2 x 36 GB drives in a RAID 1 hardware mirror to be used as our new T:\ (new data drive).

This leaves us with our original 1 x 8 GB S:\ (system partition) and a second 1 x 10 GB partition with the drive letter changed to V:\ (our old T:\ data partition).

What we wanted to do next was have a 1 x 18 GB S:\ (system drive), by combining the old S:\ and the old T:\ (relabelled to V:\).

I would like to do this without having to rebuild my S:\ (system drive) from scratch if possible (thus my suggestion of Ghost).

I assume I will have to format my original 2 x 18 GB drives in a RAID 1 hardware mirror partitioned as S:\ & T:\) to create my new 1 x 18 GB S:(system drive).

In the perfect world I might simply delete the partition V:\ (which I can do, as the data has been transferred to the 2 x 36 GB drives in a RAID 1 hardware mirror), then extend the existing 8 GB S:\ partition to occupy the
entire 2 x 18 GB drives in a RAID 1 hardware mirror.

My dilemma is if this is possible, I am unaware of the process.

If it is not, then by formatting my original 2 x 18 GB drives in (partitioned as S:\ & T:\) to create my new 1 x 18 GB S:\ (system drive) I loose the lot, again thus the suggestion of Ghost.

Given the fact that I have a RAID 1 hardware mirror, what are my odds of successfully breaking the mirror and having two separate drives intact, I know in theroy this should work I but I have not had a need to breake a morrir before and thus not aware of the prospect of success.

If I can successfully achieve this, I could then format one drive attempt to restore Ghosted image on to my 18 GB drive (HP say they don't support Ghost), if this is successfull I could then format the second drive and then re-generate the mirror, I think!

Any suggestions or options would be most appreciated. Thanks, Wayne

[Marco Hogeveen · Accepted solution]

Wayne,

Sounds interesting what you want to do...
First of all: although Ghost is not supported it will work.
I've tried it on several netservers for disaster recovery purposes and it worked fine.
You need the Dos drivers for netraid: download them from ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/ccd/keeper2sdd/servers/drvdos.exe

What I don't know is: do you have your RAID1 of 2*18 GB configured as 1 logical drive, split in 2 partitions in NT or w2k? (which one are you using) or do you have 2 logical drives on your RAID1 (8 and 10 GB), so NT sees 2 physical disks.
If you have just 1 logical drive, you can just delete the T: partition, make an extended partition to extend the s: drive.
But if you have 2 logical drives, then you might have a problem: on a netraid controller you can only delete the logical drive that was the last one which has been created.
In your case that means that when you want to delete or modify the RAID1 on your 2*18GB, you first have to delete the 2*36GB RAID1 with your data on it, then you can delete the RAID1 2*18 GB logical drive.
Deleting a logical drive does NOT destroy the data on it, but you have to recreate the logical drive just the same as it has been created before.

To be safe: first make a copy of your configuration and save it to floppy. Do it in netraid assistant: Configuration, Save.
Then write down your current configuration very precisely:
Logical drive0= ....MB and has stripe size of ..kb
The same for logical drive 1& 2.
I think you s: drive is logical drive 0, your v: is ld 1 and your new T: is ld2??

Now perform a new configuration and create a RAID0 on your first 18GB drive and make the sizes equal to the size of the disk: 18 GB.
Now create a RAID1 on both 36GB disks, the same as it was before and leave the 2nd 18 GB disk unconfigured (we need this disk in case anything goes wrong).
Initialize only the RAID0 of 18 GB
DO NOT INITIALIZE the 36 GB RAID 1!!!!! it will destroy your data.

Now try to restore your Ghost image to disk 0.
If that's succesfull and you can boot your OS then you can add the 2nd 18 GB disk to your RAID0 18 GB disk and migrate to RAID1.

If this doesn't work for any reason and you want to go back to your original configuration you can physically remove the RAID0 18 GB drive, clear netraid configuration and boot from Navigator.
Now load your original configuration.
The RAID0 18 disk will be marked as failed, since it's missing, after you've saved the configuration you can put it back in and do a rebuild.

Hope this helps.

As you probably understand, it's quite risky: make a known good full backup before proceeding!!

Marco.
If your not succesful, you can