Windows Server 2003 (w/Exchange) move to new machine
- by James Booker
I have an ageing domain controller (the only one on a 10-pc network) which needs rebooting often. I have a Dell Poweredge 2850 server doing nothing, so I'd like to move the DC to that, but here's the catch - I don't have Win2k Server Std install media any more as it's been lost.
I purchased "Easus Todo Backup Advanced Server" which claims to be able to recover to dissimilar metal, but it's not quite working (although I don't think it's the product's fault)
I know the server and PERC RAID card are good because I installed Ubuntu on the logical drive (4 x 72GB disks RAID 5) no problems.
I've booted frmo the Easus Todo backup CD (which is WinPE based) and recovered to the logical disk on the RAID (after installing driver inside the WinPE environment from a NAS drive)
The problem is when I boot the server, I can get the OS selection menu, but any option results in a blank screen, with no errors. I figure this is probably because the driver wasn't installed on the old machine (which is IDE-based (i know, i know!) and doesn;t have a RAID controller)
I've booted from the CD and copied the mraid35x.sys file to the c:\windows\system32\drivers folder on the recovered system, but it makes no difference.
I made a boot.ini with rdisks 0-10 defined, and booting from each of these resulted in a file error (i.e. 'this isn't a real disk') - the only disk that gets any response (the blank screen) is multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1) which just gives me the blank black screen and no disk activity.
Is there any way I can force the drvier to be installed on the source system (so i can do a full backup again), i've tried right-clicking the oemsetup.inf and clicking install, but it didn't actually do anything. I attempted to force it with the 'Add new hardware' wizard and forcing with the 'have disk' option but it still gave me no hardware to select.
Also I've got an identical machine running WinXP which uses the PERC driver successfully (which was obviously done at install time) and the boot.ini settings are the same : multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)
Any ideas would be appreciated.
