Topic: Moving A Secondary Partition in Windows Server 2003
Is there a good way to move the E: partition (on the same RAID as the C: partition) to an external USB HD withOUT booting from Live Media?
Re: Moving A Secondary Partition in Windows Server 2003
I am not sure if I understand well the problem. Is it just to copy the partition content of anything else?
You need to use windows 2003 tools only.
If this partition is just a data ntfs partition, you could create a new partition in the usb drive after erasing existing partition(s), or simply delete the contents of the existing partition in case there is already a ntfs partition (quite usual in the usb drives now), and then copy the content to the new partition. Finally, you can delete the original partition, after checking the copy, of course.
I can't tell what would happen with the folders' permissions for the registered users of the system.
To make or delete partitions, you can use the Disk Management utility from windows, and to copy content you can use the "copy" command.
Of course, you need to log in with full server administrator rights. I don't think that RAID changes anything in that process. Obviously, you have to reconfigure the various applications to use the new partition instead of the old one.
Otherwise, if you are allowed to boot from live media, you can use Clonezilla (on a livecd), a Linux software especially made for partition and drive cloning.
*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***
Re: Moving A Secondary Partition in Windows Server 2003
Well, unfortunately the partition is not just strictly data. Exchange is housed on it, along with SQL. The issue I'm seeing is Exchange is throwing 'not aligned on an 8 byte boundary' errors at me, which my coworker states will require rebuilding the partition to resolve. I could move the data manually, but something like gparted where I click a few times, tell it to rebuild the current partition on the USB drive, and then something that will let me move it back after I delete the unaligned partition would be preferable.
Re: Moving A Secondary Partition in Windows Server 2003
Is this something like the following link issue?
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/288077
(Mqperf.dll Is Not Aligned on an 8-byte Boundary)
If so, it is shown not as partition problem but rather as a registry problem, that doesn't need any partition rebuild to be fixed.
There is an issue that would need some partition modification. It concerns the alignment to the drive "cylinders", that are logical sections of 255x63x512 bytes, i.e. a few less than 8 MiB of disk space (not 8 bytes). However this is a more general issue, not just for an application.
*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***