I recently built a new web server. (Yes, the very sever that served up this page…) After I got all the hardware connected and I turned it on, I immediately noticed the hard disk was humming louder than the drive in the old server. I didn’t really pay much attention to it thinking it wasn’t all that loud, so I proceeded to install the operating system and countless other programs. After I was finished several hours later, I realized the not-so-loud humming of the drive was indeed too loud.
I decided I had to replace the drive, but I didn’t want to reinstall everything, especially since I had just finished getting everything just right. I started to think of a way to do this and immediately I knew what to do. It was the perfect opportunity to test out this new software I blogged about a few weeks back. DriveImage XML allows you to create a clone or backup of a system and then restore it later. This was exactly what I needed.
Here is what I did to move my server to a different drive:
- Downloaded and installed DriveImage XML on the server.
- Created a compressed backup of the system drive (c:\) to secondary drive (d:\).
- Shutdown the server.
- Installed the new empty drive as a third drive in the server (e:\) and booted the server.
- I restored the backup onto drive (e:\) using DriveImage XML.
- Shutdown the server.
- Removed drive (c:\), put drive (e:\) in it’s place and booted the server.
- When the server came back up, it was running on the new hard disk.
Yes, it was that easy! The server was about 4GB in size, but the backup image only took up 1.7GB compressed. The whole process took about an hour with the backup itself taking only about 25 minutes. The rest of the time was used up by the physical installation. (I had a few issues with drive jumpers…)