Move mirrored boot drives from one DL385 to another DL385.
I have a DL385 with Windows 2003 installed on a 73GB hard drive configured in a mirrored pair with another 73GB hard drive using the HP 6i RAID controller. I want to know if I can move those drives with installed Windows 2003 operating system from one DL385 into another identical DL385. From what I have read in the 6i documentation I should be able to move both drives in the array and boot the system.
I don't have as much experience with Windows as I do UNIX, but I did this all the time with UNIX so I would assume it should work with Windows, albeit somewhat differently.
The purpose is to perform a rolling re-build of several servers in our environment while minimizing downtime. The plan would be to take an identical server (except for memory and peripherals); load Windows and the applications; "zero out" the Windows using Sysprep; swap the drives in the production system with the newly built drives; reboot the system and re-name, configure IP address, etc. In theory as long as the CPUs and system boards are identical Windows shouldn't care about the amount of memory or differences in peripherals such as fibre cards and network cards.
Are there any caveats that I need to be aware of, either with the 6i RAID controller or moving Windows that was installed on one server to another?
Re: Move mirrored boot drives from one DL385 to another DL385.
Hi Jason,
Absolutely, you should be able to boot from a broken mirrored drive on another machine. Just remember to use the utility "sysprep" afterwards (it is in the Help menu).
