Best practices for upgrading Raid-1 on a Win2k server?

Question

I have a Dell PE 2550 w/PERC 3-DI RAID controller with a couple of SCSI drives being mirrored containing both the System info and company data on the mirrored Volume. I purchased a couple of 73gig drives that I'd like to put in to replace my originals and be able to expand the volume to take advantage of the extra space since our current 20 gig volume only has around a gig of space left. What is the best practice for doing this without an Acronis server application (which thru my research doesn't always work well with DELL systems), so that I can do this with the least amount of down time. My current plan of action is to make a couple of tape backups then switch out drives create the new array volume. Reinstall windows and restore from tape. Is this correct do I have to patch b4 reinstalling from tape? Will all my Apps. and data be placed back exactly to where they were? Any ideas that can make this process as painless as possible will be greatly appreciated. Thank you. Roland.

Answer 1

you are doing this the painful way
install norton ghost on the server
create a ghost image of the server onto a DVD
and install the new hard drives and boot in using the ghost cds u created
u say thrs about 20gb or data
tht should be like 5 dvds i would say
not too painful as compared to backing up to a tape drive and installing the OS and copying ur files