drive reallocation

[Jennifer Money]

I can't seem to remember the answer....if I have drives C: through M: and I want to reallocate some drives to another machine, can I move them without ruining the server? They are located in an EMC box and I only want to keep c,d, and f drives.

Jen

[Rita C Workman]

Hi Jennifer,

I think for anyone to answer this - alittle more info is needed. What is your system platform/operating system level for a starts?

/rcw

[Dave Wherry]

Rita is right. We need more information.
You give a DOS/Windows notation of c: - m:. I really can't answer that.
However if you are talking about HP-UX and the drives on a SCSI bus, your server will not boot. The drives have to be consecutive.

[Mike McKinlay]

Based on your question, I'm going to surmise a few things:

1. You have an NT server with multiple hard drives and various partitions on them assigned to different drive letters.

2. You want to move some of these drives to another system for a purpose.

3. You want to know how to do this.

For expediency, we'll assume "drives" above F: are on separate disk devices. You can certainly move these drives onto another system and recognize them on the other system as drives using Disk Administrator. But let's see what else happens:

1. From MainServer you remove a drive and put it in NewServer.

2. If you're not running NTFS you need to reestablish shares.

3. If you are running NTFS, you will need to reestablish shares and permissions on the NewServer drives.

4. Now on all user systems you need to reestablish their local system drive mappings from \\MainServer\share to \\NewServer\share.

The more effective way to manage this task is to put new drives in NewServer, then employ the NT Resource Kit tools SCOPY or ROBOCOPY to migrate the files. These will preserve permissions, which will be very useful, especially if you have a complex permissions structure.

If you don't have a complex permissions structure, you may just be able to restore the file structures to NewServer from a backup, then reestablish shares and permissions.

There are other caveats. If you use Microsoft's recommended method of using local groups to manage permissions on servers and make domain groups members of those local groups, those local groups must be recreated on the NewServer. You can work around this if MainServer is a PDC and NewServer is a BDC (since local groups are the same on both), but otherwise it's a more complex undertaking.

Also, if you've installed applications to the MainServer that stored files on the drives above F:, these applications will likely fail if you remove the drives and will need to be reconfigured or reinstalled.

As always, examine what it is you're trying to accomplish before attempting the process. I'd start by looking at the drives and identifying what it is that each one does. You may be able to combine drives/shares rather than simply moving everything.

Don't attempt to perform this whole task in one Sunday morning. You'll be much saner staging this over a period of time.

[Jordan Bean]

Contact your EMC SE. Be ready to answer the following questions.

What level OS are you running? Which release of EMC ControlCenter do you have? How are these [meta]volumes connected to the server? Are you using PowerPath? Will you be using SDDR to reassign them to other HBAs? Or will you be physically moving the cables? Are you planning to have the CE cut a new BIN file?