LH3000 server upgrade boot drive

[Darrel Lard]

I have an LH3000 server and am needing to upgrade the 9GB boot drive (which is on an array by itself) to a bigger drive. I have a 36GB hot-swap drive, but am needing assistance on what exactly can I do to ensure a smooth transition. Do I just need to plug this new hard drive in an empty slot, configure it to be on another array by itself, then copy the contents of the 9GB to the new 36GB, then put the new drive in the old drive slot and reconfigure? This is confusing to me. Thanks for any help.

[e4services]

No, that will not make the drive bootable for the OS. If it was simply data, that would be find, but since there is a boot record, simple copy will not be sufficiant. Remember there is a boot sector plus the OS, if Windows, has a record of which physical drive and which logical drive the boot record comes from. Changes in position will mess all that up.

Backup and restore will work, removing the old drive. Drive Image or such product can produce the result you want, we have a generic eval copy you can retrieve at our site for a one time use like this.

[Darrel Lard]

sorry but from what website can i get that Drive Image?

thanks

[Sean T. Craig]

Hi Darrel
What e4 is referring to is a drive imaging program like Norton Ghost which can clone one hard drive onto another. That would probably be the easiest thing to do, but not necessarily the safest. Make sure you have a good backup and then you can proceed. I don't know what your current configuration is, and that would help with the instructions. How many logical drives are configured? Is it just a single RAID-0 array connected to the embedded NetRAID controller? Which operating system is running? If it is Windows based, do you have NetRAID Assistant intalled?
Because this is an LH3000, you can still get free support from HP by calling 1-800-474-6836 and they can walk you through creating/deleting arrays. You're on your own for doing any kind of disk imaging, though, but at least they can tell you how to create a new RAID-0 drive with the 36GB and when you're done cloning the 9 onto the 36, they can show you how to remove the first RAID-0. It involves clearing the configuration and recreating without initializing, but you need to duplicate all the logical drive settings.
Good luck,
Sean T. Craig Sr. C.E.T., M.C.P.

[Darrel Lard]

thanks for replying - I figured that's what he was saying. Ok I'll try and explain what I have. It's Windows 2000 server. I have an extra NetRaid 1M card.
Adapter 0, Array 0: 3 drives (Channel 1, ID 13,14,15 - each physical drive is 73 gig).
Adater 1, Channel 0, Array 0: 1 physical drive (the 9GB root drive), ID 9 . Array 1: 5 physical drives - each is 36 gig and IDs 0,1,2,3,8. I do have net raid assistant installed.

I'm using ntbackup to backup my system so i hope this gathers all that i need from the C drive.

thanks for any further direction.

[Sean T. Craig]

Hi Darrel,

So let me see if I have this right. Is this the way your config looks?

Adapter 0 - Integrated HP NetRAID
ID13 - A0-0 - Online - 70006MB
ID14 - A0-1 - Online - 70006MB
ID15 - A0-2 - Online - 70006MB

Adapter 1 - NetRAID-1M
ID0 - A1-0 - Online - 34731MB
ID1 - A1-1 - Online - 34731MB
ID2 - A1-2 - Online - 34731MB
ID3 - A1-3 - Online - 34731MB
ID8 - A1-4 - Online - 34731MB
ID9 - A0-0 - Online - 8677MB

Okay, the first thing you want to do is record all your logical drive properties. This is important because we will need to do some clearing of the configuration and recreating it. The NetRAID Controllers will allow you to write a configuration from scratch and if the array has NOT been initialized, it will use these values to access the information on the disks. Specifically, we are looking for Stripe Size, Write Policy, Read Policy & Cache Policy.

Next, put your new 36GB Hard drive in the bottom slot on the left hand side (or first slot in the top row on a rack-mounted model).
This will be Adapter0, Ch1, ID10 and NetRAID Assistant will show it as "Ready". Use NRA to create a RAID0 array on this drive.

Restart the server so that Disk Management sees the drive. It will show Unallocated Space on that disk. Partition/format using Disk Management.

Next step is to clone your 9GB drive over to your new RAID-0. If I'm reading your config correctly, it will be from Disk 0 to Disk 3

Now comes the scary part. Power down the server. Replace ID9 with the drive in ID10. 9 will be the top drive on the right-hand side in a pedestal mount or the last drive in the bottom cage of a rack-mounted server.
Here are the steps in Point-Form:

1. We will go into M during POST and use the NetRAID Express Tools to delete/recreate config.
2. Go to the Objects Menu and Selecting Adapter.
3. Choose Adapter 1 and escape back to the Management Menu.
4. Go into Configure and choose "Clear Configuration" and Proceed.
5. Choose "New Configuration" and Proceed.
6. Go down to ID9 and press the bar and then . ID9 will now show A0-0.
7. If the config looks like it does above, go back up to ID0 and press the bar 5 times and press If it is reversed, follow the order you recorded.
8. Press again to configure the arrays. It will start with Array 0.
9. Pay close attention to the Advanced Menu and make sure the logical drive properties match.
10. Escape back to the previous menu and choose "Accept"
11. This will take you to Array 1. Follow the same steps as the previous array and choose "Accept"
12. Choose "Accept" one last time and it will ask you if you want to save the configuration. Choose "Yes"
13. Escape all the way out of the utility making sure not to initialize the arrays.

This should allow you to boot the server to the O/S on the new 36GB Hard Drive. You can now use the NetRAID Assistant to Delete the RAID-0 drive you created on ID10. Click on that Logical drive (not physical drive) to highlight it, then right-click and choose Delete. If Delete isn't there, look for an Advanced Menu or Tools Menu.

Let us know how that works,

Sean T. Craig Sr. C.E.T., M.C.P.

[Darrel Lard]

Hello again and thanks for the detailed reply. Before the "scary" part, can I not just change the boot.ini file to start from the other drive? Or am I showing more of my ignorance here? Thanks

[Darrel Lard]

Hello again - ignore the above dumb question. However, I finally got my drive in (had problems ordering it). Now I went to partition/format it, but I noticed the my current C Drive has a 31 MB partition that is the EISA Configuration. How do I make one of these on the new drive, or do I need to? Thanks

[Sean T. Craig]

Hi Darrel,

The EISA Partition is what HP calls the "Utility Partition" and you will likely never use it. If you want it though, you can keep it.

Sean T. Craig Sr. C.E.T., M.C.P.

[Darrel Lard]

Hi again - I was excited about replacing the drive so at 5:00 today, I cloned the drive (went smoothly), replaced the drive, did the Ctrl-M Setup, and the new drive booted into that HP Utility thing for some reason - I'm not sure why it wouldn't boot up in the OS. Anyway, I put the old drive back in, did the Ctrl-M Setup again, and booted up. Boots up fine. However, now I've lost all of my partitioned drives, except for the FIRST ones on each of the arrays. I called HP Tech Support, they basically said to call Microsoft. In Disk Management it shows the first partition of each disk, then the rest is showing as unallocated space. I finally decided to pay the $245.00 to call Microsoft and I've been on the phone with them for 5+ hours now and counting. They are currently using Dskprobe.exe to search the drives for partitions. Their plan is to copy the backup boot sector to the master boot sector, then reboot. I hope this works - it's taking forever. Anyway, just thought I'd catch up anyone else reading this. I will repost again when I figure more out. I was just bored sitting here at 1:30 in the morning.

[Darrel Lard]

Just in case anyone else comes across this. After 8+ hours on the phone with Microsoft, they finally gave up - luckily, they're giving me a refund of the $245.00 I spent just to call them. Basically they said that the boot record of each partition was wiped out completely and they can't restore it. Another problem was that each partition that I did see was set at FAT instead of NTFS, so it seemed to even rewrite those. Anyway, I tried several 3rd party programs to get my data back. I bought DTI Data Recovery's Recover It All program. It saw the files, but only showed them as 60 bytes and wouldn't retrieve them. Their website even says that NASA and Lockheed Martin used them. I guess anyone can use them, but did they get their data back? They won't issue me a refund either. I finally found Runtime.Org's "GetDataBack for NTFS". This program scans the entire hard drive for each partition, then you select the partition, and select the files you want to restore. Some partitions showed <30% recoverability, but I quickly found out that it was talking about deleted files. Since I wasn't recovering deleted files, I just selected everything and copied it to different workstations. This worked brilliantly (it takes some time to run, but that's ok). Next, I got HP Support on the phone before I did anything else. They walked me through putting my new Hard Drive back into the server, we restarted and I got NTLDR is missing. We tried many many different things. We also received "Operating System not found". Finally, we discovered that the C Drive boot partition was no longer active so we went into FDISK from a WIN98 bootup disk, set the partition active and it came up. That call was 5.5 hours. We gave up and he advised me to Backup, reinstall windows onto a new harddrive, then restore windows again. I was going to do that, but, since I had all my data, I was going to take a chance with trying to resize the partition on my 9 gig drive (so I wouldn't have to replace it with the new 36 gig drive). I finally came across Acronis Disk Director Suite 9.0. I read reviews of it and the only bad things were about the dual boot manager. I'm not using that so I bought it, installed it, rebooted, resized my c drive, rebooted, and it worked wonderfully. This is exactly what I should have done in the first place. I was scared though since it was dealing with my boot drive. The program was $50.00. It's worth more (just not worth the $750.00 that Symantec wanted to do the exact same thing).

Thanks for your help though. I learned much more information. Believe it or not, Microsoft taught me quite a bit too. They were very helpful on all questions I had and I wouldn't have been upset if I didn't get a refund from them. I didn't even ask for one, they just offered it to me.

On the other hand, I hope NOBODY uses DTI Data Recover (DTIDATA.COM) They are no help at all. I have called several times asking for a refund and they either disconnect me or transfer me to never never land.