Joseph Brower

So we’re helping someone migrate from an old server with a single hard disk to a new server with a full RAID 10 raid array on a hardware raid card.  This server runs Windows Server 2003, so we were trying to find the quickest and most cost effective way to do it.  I had heard about Clonezilla but never had the time to mess with it, but that time has come.  I downloaded the ISO yesterday, burned it to a CD and popped it into the source machine.  This was in a test environment, so that I could mess around with it.  I selected the copy to ram version so that I could remove the disk and place it in the new server.  After it booted up I followed the instructions (which is important) and quickly had it waiting for the destination machine to connect.  We had the server boot up off of the disk and went to the terminal and typed in the commands that the first machine was telling us to do.  It worked immediately.  It even saw the 3ware RAID controller volume and started copying happily.  It appears that all of our test data made it over ok.  It copied pretty quickly too (about 10MB/s on our not so swift network).  We’re going to be full gigabit when we do it for real tonight.  If everything goes as planned, I should be able to copy, repair install, and be done without having to worry about reinstalling any software or fighting with any configuration (outside of drivers).  I’ll be sure to let everyone know how it goes.  If you ever need cloning over the network abilities, you should really try out Clonezilla, it is free, open source, and seems to do an amazing job.