Good afternoon
This is slightly OT - can anyone advise me on a utility which will allow me
to enlarge the boot partition on my SBS 2000 server or move the whole
contents of Disk0 to a new drive and make it bootable?
The default installation on my Dell Poweredge 1400 partitioned the 18GB SCSI
drive as a small FAT partition (for Dell system utilities) a 4 GB drive C
and a 132GB drive D (both NTFS).
I am down to about 280MB on C: and no amount of housekeeping can get this
above around 400MB. I have two other drives in the box (36 and 68GB)
respectively and I thought that the least dangerous thing to do was clone
disk0 to the 68GB drive, then swop the SCSI disk IDs.
Partition Magic is the thing most people recommend for partition maintenance
but this is a workstation product which won't run on servers. The server
version (called Volume Manager) seems to be volume licensed at around $600
minimum. This is too much money for one-time use. I bought Paragon's Hard
Disk Manager (which includes their Partition Manager 5.5) but I can't get
this to work properly. I've tried emailing Paragon for technical support but
this is a German product - the manuals and help stuff is poorly written
(might be great in German FAIK) and the online support is similarly
inadequate.
The particular problem I have is that these partition managers can't work on
the boot partition with open files so it has to reboot in its own OS (a kind
of mock-DOS). When PM did this, it appeared to stall part way through even
though there was loads of disk activity.
I wondered whether I could use Ghost to clone the partitions from disk0 to
disk1 and then use Partition Manager to resize the new partitiion (which
won't be active so won't have the problem of open files).
Anyway, I'd be grateful for advice from anyone who has actually succeeded in
cloning a boot disk in this way. To be honest, I am not really interested in
hearing from folk who haven't actually tried it and succeeded.
Thanks
Paul, UK