I decided to upgrade the hard drives in my server last night. Probably should’ve waited till the weekend but at least it’s done!

I started out with 3 drives…

0 – C: – 20GB Seagate

1 – D:/E: – 60GB Western Digital split into 2 partitions (45GB and 10GB)

2 – H: – 160GB Western Digital

And I had 2 80GB Western Digitals to go in there.

What I wanted to do was to transfer everything off disk 1 onto one of the new 80GB drives, then wipe disk 1 and transfer disk 0 onto it. This would increase the free space on D: and E: from 45/10 to 60/15, and more than double my C: drive which now has a lot more room for expansion (going from 9GB free to over 40GB!). The existing 20GB Seagate would be removed from the computer and left spare.

I took all the hard drives out and worked out where I wanted them all to go, then plugged everything back in again. Then I started Acronis MigrateEasy.

My brother had upgraded his hard drive a month or two ago as he’d run out of space completely and really didn’t want to have to reinstall everything again, so I suggested using MigrateEasy to move everything off his old drive onto the new one. I’d never used it before and it would be nice to test it out to see how efficient it was.

Everything went smoothly and once the copy process was complete we could remove his old drive and replace it with the new one, and boot up the system to see what happens. Everything worked as expected, Windows XP didn’t even care that it had been moved from one drive to another, instead just showed us that there was a lot more free space than there had been.

So after that success I decided I would try it out on my server. I was a little apprehensive to say the least. If everything went wrong I’d lose a hell of a lot of data, almost all of it non-replaceable – especially my email (I run Exchange Server 2003 picking up everything on my 3 domain names).

I needn’t have worried though, both operations went perfectly. I migrated D:/E: to a new 80GB drive with the partitions being automagically increased to fill the space and C: onto the old D:/E: drive, just as I had planned. I did have a slight problem removing the D: and E: partitions, but that was because I had booted into Windows, and WSUS stores all its data on D:. After rebooting into Safe Mode I was able to remove the old partitions and change the drive letters on the new drive to the old ones so that any programs that need files on D: could still find them.

I now have a lot more free space on my C: drive, room to spare on D: and I also have an extra 80GB on a new G: drive which I haven’t started to use yet. I shouldn’t need to do any more server upgrading for a while.

If anyone is planning to replace their existing hard drive and doesn’t want to have to reinstall everything from scratch then I highly recommend using Acronis MigrateEasy.