Needed to copy the folder rights & permissions in new drives with the same letters

Hi

In one server, running under windows server 2003 operating system, currently C,E & F drives are present. Two 500 GB LUNS disk space have been allocated with drive letters G & H have been assigned to them. Data in E & F have to be copied to G & H respectively.
After successful copy of the data , the G & H drives have to be renamed to E & F drives and the old E & F drives will be removed from the server after ensuring the proper running of the software application hosted in this server.
Currently shares are present in both E & F drives ; I need to retain all the same settings related to shares & it's permissions in the new E & F drives so that the hosted application which rely on the shares in E & F will function properly after adding the new 500 GB drives namely E & F drives.

Anybody please help in this regard about the steps to be followed in this activity

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Asif Dasl

1 - Download & install <RichCopy>

2 - Open RichCopy and go to View and select Advanced

3 - Select the source & destination drives

4 - Go in to Options and then "File attributes, Error Handling"

5 - Tick the 4 boxes under Security Information ( Descretionary ACL, Group, Owner & System ACL) screenshot1

6 - Go back to Overview and change the "Directory search" to 2, "Directory copy" to 5 and "File Copy" to 5. - You can play around with the thread numbers if it's taking a long time to do.

You can copy the files during work hours or after hours. If you do it during work hours you will need to do 2 scans. 1 initial copy and the second with different options (Options->Overview->Copy if->"Security setting" is different and "File Size" is different and "Time stamp" is different) screenshot2

I've included 2 screenhots to show you the settings.

Take the old drives out and change the drive letters. Job done.

Security Settings.jpg

Copy If File Attributes Are Different.jpg

shanparames

Hi Asif

Thanks a lot for your detailed information; I understood very clearly that this is a GUI based compared to ROBOCOPY.
I have found another type of method also at this link at
Move shares and permissions to a new disk in Windows Server - Spiceworks

I found the difference between your method and this one in only registry export and import of the lanman shares section.

What is your suggestion regarding this method because we have ROBOCOPY usually used in our environment for data copy?

Asif Dasl

You can use RoboCopy too, RichCopy is the successor to RoboCopy - I used it primarily because it has a better GUI. As for the registry settings, yes you can do that too. I made an assumption that you would be setting up the shares again but if you have a boat load of shares then export and re-import the LanmanServer registry settings will save you a lot of time.

shanparames

Thanks Asif for your comments

shanparames

Hi Asif

I forgot to mention that after doing the robocopy for F to H drive and then renaming the H Drive to F drive with excluding the pagefile.sys, will the server has to be restarted with original pagefile.sys copied from F to H Drive in this scenario? or should I leave it without pagefile.sys so that server will automatically create the pagefile.sys in so called F Drive?

Asif Dasl

Leave it without the pagefile.sys. In an ideal world you would disable the pagefile of that drive before moving drives but the pagefile is regenerated on boot up so I think you should be OK. HTH.

shanparames

Hi Asif

Thanks a lot for your reply and clarifying the doubt

shanparames

Hi Asif & all

Thanks for all who helped me in achieving successfully finishing my project .
I here to comment on that it is very important to keep into consideration on the pagefile.sys on the drives where you are going to rename

Asif Dasl

Did you have to keep them on the drives after all?

shanparames

Hi Asif

I followed the things below. the pagefile.sys is set in one drive at last .not kept in many drives where it was the situation before the renaming .

Thanks for all who helped me in achieving successfully finishing my project .

The document provided by Casey Crowe at is helpful for me and minimized my efforts of recreation of shares steps after the renaming of the drives
Move shares and permissions to a new disk in Windows Server - Spiceworks
Special thanks to Casey Crowe
I here to comment on that it is very important to keep into consideration on the pagefile.sys on the drives where you are going to rename
The operation was cancelled due to an internal error” error message when trying to change the drive letter
Found that the pagefile.sys existing the drives to be renamed caused the issues and found by myself during the process about this .
At last when I was googling to this issue is little bit old which is discussed elaborately at here :
http://danv74.wordpress.com/2011/07/22/the-operation-was-cancelled-due-to-an-internal-error-error-message-when-trying-to-change-the-drive-letter

linuxabuser

Robocopy /copyall will copy NTFS permissions. Richcopy is not the successor to robocopy, it's not even a Microsoft product.

Asif Dasl

linuxabuser wrote: »

Richcopy is not the successor to robocopy, it's not even a Microsoft product.

Follow the <link> to Microsoft's website and read the first paragraph. RoboCopy GUI came out in 2006, RichCopy in 2009.

Microsoft wrote:

Remember, as with all of our free utilities, RichCopy is provided as-is, and it's not supported by Microsoft.

That doesn't mean that it's still not useful.

It's a free country, use whatever utility you wish.