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Weird server behaviour after drive cloning

M

MulLa

Golden Member
Hi all

Trying to upgrade the server's HDD to a faster one. The server is running W2kAS in a domain environment. The server is a domain controller, DNS, DHCP. It has 2 HDDs installed one primary master is running the OS and programs and a primary slave is storing user data and network shared drives. The drive being upgraded is the primary slave which is only used to store data with no programs / OSes installed.

Using Powerquest's Drive Image 5, since it won't run on a server I took the drive out put it in an XP workstation and booted it up with the Drive Image boot disks and proceeded with the cloning. After it completed it asked for a reboot which I didn't do and just switched off the machine. Went back and put the newly cloned drive into the server... here's the weird happenings.

1) Server won't boot up only presented with a blank screen after BIOS tests. Solved by going into BIOS and redetecting the faster drive.

2) Restarted, booted up find but after I logged in as Admin it said norton was unable to start up. Um... ok so I did another restart...

3) Third time is not necessarily lucky... this time it took AGES to start up and it frozed on the detecting network settings screen. Finally finished and logged in as Admin it took AGES again to load personal settings. Then a prompt came up saying a number of services failed to start and I should check event viewer. When into event viewer and noticed a whole load of errors.

4) Restarted again and this time everything seemed to have loaded fine no errors no nothing. I can see the drives. Network access to the drives are fine too but is unable to delete the files over the network "normally" at start. I have to delete the file and nothing would happen. Then I closed windows explorer and it said the file is being used and is unable to delete it and I have to restart explorer and delete it again and it worked fine. After doing that on EVERY workstations delete worked like it's supposed to again.

Anyone have any idea why this is happening? Now the server seemed to be working fine. I can't understand why swapping a data only drive would cause so much problems since there is no part of the OS installed on that drive. Is it because I didn't restart the XP machine after it finished cloning and it has to do some "final" steps to finish it off??


Thanks
 
Partition magic 4 and 5 had NTFS issues with the new NTFS I think, not to mention that if they did anything to upset the servers file system it would understandably get pissy about deletes.. about the other stuff, sounds like curruption maybe? Let's just hope the new drive aint bad.
 
I didn't use Partition Magic at all tho. Besides the drive being cloned is a w2k formatted drive not XP format so I would believe it won't have any of those NTFS incompatibility problems. Drive Image 5 is XP compatible anyway. Hm... Let's just hope that the drive would behave properly from now.

Yes it is running much faster than before not to mention much roomier too!
 
So you didn't get any of those service unable to start errors at the start? Hm... maybe my installation just needs a few restarts to adjust. 🙁
 


<< I didn't use Partition Magic at all tho. Besides the drive being cloned is a w2k formatted drive not XP format so I would believe it won't have any of those NTFS incompatibility problems. Drive Image 5 is XP compatible anyway. Hm... Let's just hope that the drive would behave properly from now.

Yes it is running much faster than before not to mention much roomier too! >>



Yeah but they are both made by partition magic, hint hint. But if you used the new version I'm sure it's fine.

I did hear about some weird problem that can happen, kind of like messing the inodes of an ext2 drive. It was NTFS related too, might want to google it.
 
No problems so far. Ghost 2001 is pretty good, it allowed me to resize the drive to a larger drive as well. Give it a shot.
 
Zach Yer I'll probably look up Google and see if it would shed some light on this situation.

blstriker You mean Ghost can actually let you resize the destination partition as you are cloning drive to drive? Actually I was being stupid 😱 Since I can just use the boot disk to boot into Drive Image so I should be able to do the cloning right at the server even if it didn't let me install it. But I have to do it the long way and did it at a workstation.

Oh well at least I learned something 🙂
 
There are two ways to copy, to copy a partition or copy a drive. When you copy a drive, you cannot change sizes. The destination must be the same as the original. However, you can copy drives of differenct sizes. I cloned a 10 gig hd onto a 20 hd and now my server is using a 20 gig hd. It resized the drive for me. I hope this makes sense.

 
blstriker Yep I totally understood what you said. I did a copy drive before since there are a few partitions to copy. I'll give copy partition a shot next time if I get the chance. Thanks for the info!
 
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