I want to give a last boost to my old ProLiant ML350 G5 server which just needs to be reliable for a few more year only !
With a defined budget of about 1500$ (I do not have more), i plan to replace the CPU (+ adding a second one), the battery cache of my raid controller (E200i), double the RAM, and change all hard drives.
I have 7 HDD (SAS 10krpm, 72Gb) + 1 spare in RAID5, and my system is all FULL (no empty tray, full disks).
in my current RAID5 array, I have 2 partitions:
- 1 OS partition, 20Gb
- 1 data partition, 350 Gb
I plan to replace these 8 disks with :
- 2 x 300Gb SAS 15krpm in RAID 1 (= 1 partition for OS)
- 2 x 2Tb SATA 7.2krpm in RAID 1 (= 1 partition for DATA)
My biggest constraint is that I have only 01 day to upgrade my server. Therefore, I'm looking for cloning all my files (OS + data partition) to my new arrays, i.e :
- the OS partition shall be cloned to the RAID1 "2x300Gb array"
- the data partition shall be cloned to the RAID1 "2x2Tb array"
My second problem is that I need to physically remove all the old hard drives before inserting the new ones.
I'm running Windows Server 2003 R2, and even if MS support will expire soon, I cannot buy a new licence and spent time in configuration. Obviously, with 1500$, I cannot also buy a new server that I could start configuring from now !
Thought about ASR (NTBackup), but I have no floppy drive (and do not really want to invest in one !)
Thought about a clonezilla clone, and read this interesting link : Windows Server 2003 - move C: partition to a new SAS disk , but i'm not so confident in using Clonezilla with RAID5.
What should be the best option to quickly and easily (if possible!) "copy/paste" my OS (so no need to reinstall and reconfigure all) and DATA / programs / services, etc... ?
Thanks for your comments