Had a couple of errors not addressed in usenet news so I'll post the
whole procedure.
I upgraded the NT4 SP6a server hard drive from 40gb to WD 160gb today
on an older motherboard. The motherboard supported ultra dma 100 but
did not support 48 bit lba (> 137gb) so I had to install the ultra ata
controller card supplied with the drive to see the full drive.
Problem 1: I ignored the instructions that said install the drivers
(why install 3rd party disk drivers if you dont have to) for the i;tra
ata card before swapping the original drive to the new controller.
This of course failed with a blue screen
(unable_to_access_ide_boot_device?).
Swapping the boot drive back to the original onboard controller and
installing the Western Digital Ultra ATA Controller Card Driver Disk
driver disk by selecting control panel, scsi controllers, add, have
disk, and browsing the floppy for the .inf file solved this nicely.
Problem2: Next I tried to copy the original data to the new drive
using Disk Administrator disk mirroring (raid 1). I wanted to try it
this way rather than use the Data Lifeguard Tools Diskette because I
have had antivirus hissy fits due to 3rd party partitioning software
in the past. Also, I wanted the added space in the new drive to expand
the last large ntfs partition rather than adding yet another
partition. If you find the article on the microsoft support page, it
explains that to mirror a partition, you have to hold down the control
button and select with the mouse the source partition and the section
of free space on the new drive where the partition will be mirrored
and then select from the Fault Tolerance pull down and Establish
mirror. This worked great for the fat boot/system partition, and 3
other shared fat partitions, but when I got to the 5th ntfs partition,
it failed with an error that there was no room for anymore partitions.
It seemed strange that the original drive was working fine with 5
partitions.
The short answer is that the 3 of the source drive partitions were in
an extended partition but disk administrator mirrored them as primary
partitions. The solution was to create an extended partition large
enough to hold the 3 source drive partitions and then mirror them to
the space in the extended partition. Make note that when disk
administrator creates the mirror on the new drive, the mirror
partition is slightly larger than the source partition due to some
overhead required by the NT implementation. The resulting file
structure was 1 2gig fat boot/system partition, 3 logical shared 2gig
fat drives in the extended partition, and the remaining space in an
ntfs partition. Another note to make is that while disk administrator
is copying the source file to the new partition during the mirror
operation, the text of the new partition is red and the status is
initializing until the copy operation is complete. When the copy is
complete, the status of the mirror will be healthy. Exit disk
administrator and wait overnight if necessary for large drives.
problem 3: To copy the files from the large ntfs partition to the new
drive ntfs partition (now much larger) I tried to highlighted all of
the files using edit, select all, and the right mouse clicked on one
of the highlighted files and selected copy and then paste to the new
ntfs partition. Expecting it to complete successfully, I returned
later only to find the following message:
"Error Copying Files - Cannot copy xxxxx: Access is denied. Make sure
the disk is not full or write protected and that the file is not
currently in use."
To solve this I had to highlight each file having this problem and add
myself as a user with full control under the security tab by right
mouse clicking.
Hope this information helps someone in the future.
Here's a question I still have:
I have a MSI k7t266 Pro2 RU Raid motherboard with an onboard Promise
20265R hardware raid controller. I was able to use the onboard raid
bios routines to hardware copy a drive but I was not able to boot from
the raid controller. I didn't get the RAID manual with the
motherboard and msi's web site makes reference to it, but it does not
appear to be available for download. Is it possible to run the
motherboard in raid 1 using only drives connected to the ide raid
connectors?
I don't know what I don't know,
Rick
