Making non-raid into raid 5

ODNation

So this is a bit of a headache for me and I want to make sure that I'm doing this correctly before I actually do it. Here is the story... My cousin owns a restaurant equipment business and for years I have been telling him that he needs to hire a full time IT guy rather than asking me to come fix things during my lunch break... so he finally hires someone, but the kid is straight out of ITT Tech and zero experience. I told him to get someone with experience, but he didn't want to shell out 50K+ a year... so he's paying this dude 35K... whatever, you get what you pay for

So I tell my cousin that he needs to get 2 brand new servers, one for the domain controller and the other running the point of sales... the new admin orders the server (overkill)... one with raid 5, and the other (point of sales) with no redundancy. So now Im dragged back into trying to fix this... I tell the admin to go back to dell and order a raid controller that will work with the server thats ordered AND order 4 additional hard drives that are exactly the same thats in the server... so he did that...

the point of sales server has server 2008 r2 loaded

Here is my concern.... for starters, i have never done this before (no redundancy to raid 5)... here is my plan, and please let me know if im wrong

- shut down the server after hours and put the raid controller in
- let windows install the raid controller so that it is recognized in device manager
- after windows installs the controller, download the drivers from dells website and install
- after all that is done, come in on a weekend and do a complete backup using windows server backup... back it up to a formatted external hard drive
- after backup is done, shut down the server... put the other 4 drives in, reboot and go into the raid controller interface...
- once in the interface, configure the drives for raid 5 with hot spare
- reboot and boot off the server 2008 r2 disc and restore the image that we backed up

now here is where i get concerned... everything should restore normally despite it being raid 5 now since its still 1 logical drive...

has anybody ever done this?

thanks for your time

jibbajabba

If you are using a hardware raid controller then Windows will see only one logical drive regardless - it would simply not "know" whats "underneath"...

So if you create ONE volume inside your raid controller, whether it is raid 5, 0, 10 etc., it will always present one volume to Windows ..

Now as for your plan .. it could work .. Although I have never done it that way myself. It would surprise me if it works (i.e. insert the raid controller, install the driver and use it later on as boot volume) and it would surprise if it doesn't (if that makes sense) - something I haven't tried myself.

You will still have to have your driver handy as the PE environment of Server 2008R2 (when booting via DVD and try to restore the backup image) wouldn't know the controller (unless its on the HCL of course).

If all fails you can perform a repair as well, providing the correct driver and it SHOULD work as well ...

Personally we always every performed a restore onto different hardware using Acronis with Universal Resotre - but in my opinnion I'd say your plan works ...

All you can do is try I suppose - Let's face it - you won't touch the old disks / install so if it all goes wrong you just whack the old disks in and re-think.

Povilas

About backing system up and then restoring on different drive: You thinking right. I have done it many times (mostly for testing as part of business continuity policy) and sometimes it works and sometimes it don't. Especially if you use Windows Backup - restoring on different controller sometimes causes Windows not to boot, you may have to face Server 2008 bcdedit tool and do some manual fixing. Also be ready to get some unexpected errors like "destination drive too small" (even it ten times bigger than backup image) and then do restoring partition by partition using command line utility wbadmin.
Thought almost always restoring using wbadmin, and diskpart succeeds, but one tool - Paragon Adaptive Restore has saved my life couple of times and it's easy to use.

Bit OT: that's where virtualization helps a lot - you don't have to care about hardware, don't need to backup, restore - just add controller, copy VM files and boot it up. I recently come to practice to virtualize systems even if it's only machine on server - it minimizes downtime radically.

ODNation

Povilas wrote:

Especially if you use Windows Backup - restoring on different controller sometimes causes Windows not to boot,

thats kinda what i assumed which is why i wanted to put the raid controller in the server first, let the OS recognize it, and drivers installed... that way, when we go to restore the backup, the driver for the controller should be in the backup

Gomjaba wrote:

You will still have to have your driver handy as the PE environment of Server 2008R2

interesting that you bring that up... so im guess that i should probably use my thumb drive to have all the raid controller drivers on it...

i have never restored a backup to a server 2008 server before.... does it work the same as vista? ive done a full image backup of it... wiped that sucker clean and restored the image... worked like a charm - granted there wasnt any hardware changes, but is the concept the same?

tiersten

You mentioned coming in during the weekend to make a backup? Does this mean that you don't have a regularly scheduled backup?

ODNation

tiersten - there is a daily backup (there should be at least)... but i would want to make a backup the day im doing this upgrade for peace of mind... i really cant trust him because his lack of experience, but at the same time, i want him to learn from watching me and listening to what im telling him - not to mention, documenting everything... the last thing i want is a disaster and trying to recover from his backups when suddenly, they are no good lol

tiersten

Ah okay. You should verify that backup as well as doing your own backup. I've seen too many systems which didn't have any backup system at all and they just relied on RAID to be their "backup".

-Foxer-

ODNation wrote: »

thats kinda what i assumed which is why i wanted to put the raid controller in the server first, let the OS recognize it, and drivers installed... that way, when we go to restore the backup, the driver for the controller should be in the backup

One time when I moved my windows home server from one motherboard to a new (but similar) one, it wouldn't boot at all. They were both intel boards and used the same chipset, but the problem was that on the original one the SATA ports were set to IDE mode, and in the new one it was set to ACHI mode.

Nothing I did would make it boot, so I finally just wiped it out and started over. Afterwards I realized what had happened, and it probably would have booted if I'd had set the SATA mode back to IDE.

Moral of the story, I don't think it will boot when you restore it from the backup, even if windows has the drivers for the RAID controller. You'll probably have to do a reinstall.

tiersten

-Foxer- wrote: »

One time when I moved my windows home server from one motherboard to a new (but similar) one, it wouldn't boot at all. They were both intel boards and used the same chipset, but the problem was that on the original one the SATA ports were set to IDE mode, and in the new one it was set to ACHI mode.

Nothing I did would make it boot, so I finally just wiped it out and started over. Afterwards I realized what had happened, and it probably would have booted if I'd had set the SATA mode back to IDE.

Bit late now but for future reference, you can enable the other ATA controller driver in the registry. This means it will boot from legacy ATA and from AHCI. During installation, the Windows setup process will install both but only enable the one you need as it wastes a second or two during bootup if you have one that isn't used enabled.

Don't be surprised if Windows Activation throws a tantrum if you do move from one HD to another though! The HD is one of the main criteria for the function that determines if you need reactivation.

Povilas

ODNation wrote: »

i have never restored a backup to a server 2008 server before.... does it work the same as vista? ive done a full image backup of it... wiped that sucker clean and restored the image... worked like a charm - granted there wasnt any hardware changes, but is the concept the same?

Recovery of 2008 is like Vista and 2008 R2 is like Windows 7. Main difference is that there is hidden 100MB boot partition now (and there may be even more hidden "recovery" partitions by vendor), so if you backup and restore only C: drive it won't work (i saw such cases). And yes - restore process works perfectly on the same machine, but try to change disk controller and it gets harder. But I have successfully restored backup of Intel machine with SCSI drives, on absolutely different AMD machine with SATA drives - so everything can be done.
I don't worry about drivers much. This is not 2003 or XP where you must provide floppy disk with drivers. Now you can use anything you want including disc that came with card, and 2008 is equipped with a lot of drivers already and support many cards out of box.

ODNation

Talked to a Dell tech this morning and he said that it will work just as long as each HD is not larger than 750 GB

Povilas

ODNation wrote: »

Talked to a Dell tech this morning and he said that it will work just as long as each HD is not larger than 750 GB

Would like to hear how this HDD size limitation is related to success of restoring backup...

ODNation

Povilas - the dell tech said...

Your boot virtual disk cannot exceed 2048GB (2TB) in size. So, if your drives are 750GB or larger, you'll need to carve the raid 5 into 2 virtual disks (I assume you wanted to make a 4-disk raid 5 instead of a 3-disk raid 5 with a hotspare) where the first virtual disk will be your bootdrive and is probably best off at 100GB or so, and the second virtual disk can be the total remainder of the raid 5.

tiersten

You need GPT to handle partitions greater than 2TB and the BIOS would need to understand GPT to boot from that. The fake PC partition table that GPT has wouldn't be of any use since it can't handle > 2TB partitions. GPT is generally only part of EFI as well and not the old PC BIOS.

Povilas

ODNation wrote: »

Your boot virtual disk cannot exceed 2048GB (2TB) in size.

I thought that they will say so - these guys mostly use predefined answers. That 2TB problem is known to me (building 10TB+ storages for years) but still - it doesn't relate to success or failure of restore. It's not related problem.