Exchange hard drive upgrade
I have an Exchange 2003 Server that is running out of disk space. I would like to upgrade the data store hard drive without re-installing Exchange. What are the steps I would have to take to before and after upgrading the hard drive?
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ASKED:
February 9, 2006 2:12 PM
UPDATED:
February 14, 2006 9:22 AM
Answer Wiki:
Is your store on the same drive as the OS? What other data do you have on that drive?
If you're just wanting to move your Exchange store to a new drive, install the new drive, configure it to the system with a drive letter, open Exchange Manager, Under Servers->YourServerName->First Storage Group, right-click on Mail Box Store and select Dismount Store. Your users mailboxes will be unavailable during the move. Next, right-click on the Mail Box Store and select Properties. Select the Database Tab. At the top there are two fields showing the current location of your Exchange databases. Select the Browse button next to each of the fields, navagate to your new drive and "Open" your new Exchange databases on this drive. After you click OK Exchange will copy the database to this drive. Once you've finished don't forget to re-mount the store. Then you're done! Good Luck!
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If I were doing it, I would first stop all Exchange services and do a full back up of any drives that have Exchange or Exchange data installed. Then you can use a program like Acronis True Image server edition to do a disk image of the drives. Make sure the program you use supports server use. Most have a client and a server edition. Add the new drives and repartition them to the new size (this will involve redoing any raid arrays in question.) Once you have the new partitions in place, restore the disk images using your disk imaging program. That should do the trick. The tape back up is in case the disk image fails on the data drive, you can restore it from back up to the newly partitioned larger drives. Whenever you work with Exchange it is a good idea to have a back up recovery plan in place. Good luck.
I agree with Tracybs. Just add the drive, format and then move the store across to it. Don’t forget to ensure you have a valid backup before doing htis. Though I’ve never had anything go amiss when I have done it, on can never be too careful.
Of course, you really don’t give us a lot of information to go on. If you are running Exchange on a RAID array, you would need to add a drive to the array and let it do its thing to expand the array and make the appropriate configuartion changes.
Steve
I cannot emphasize about back-up enough.
The one time, I tried doing the procedure what Tracy is recommending, we landed up trashing the exchange message stores and ultimately had to restore.
The procedure is what I would go with, but once again, BACKUP!!!!!!
Best of Luck
Regards
Very much depends on how your drives are set up. If the data is on a separate disk or disk set than the OS, if you have enough slots for new disks in the server, if RAID 5 does the controller support array/disk expansion?
The easiest is what everyone else suggests, however if you don’t have enough slots in your server and the Info Stores are on a separate disk set you could stop all Exchange services (set to disable) do a backup of the IS drive, take the old drives out, put new ones in and configure with same drive letter; restore from backup and restart services.
Regards,
Dan