Hi Guys,
I have a HP ProLiant ML370 G3 that acts as one of our DNS servers as well as Active Directory and file sharing for our plant within our company. Yesterday, I noticed that the Windows partition (11.7GB) has only 176MB of free space left. Whoa!? I started to investigate and discovered that most of it is within the Windows Directory and the rest is taken up by Windows Updates and the handful of programs that are installed on the machine. To free up as much free space as I could, I uninstalled a couple of programs that should not be on there such as MS Office XP. Looking more deeply, I found that my RAID Array is 97% fragmented.
So, looking into alternatives... I have come up with a new plan that I would like some feedback on. I'd like to create an image of the entire system using something such as Acronis Backup & Recovery and then do a hot swap on the HDDs using larger drives. Of course, I'd have to set it up again in the RAID controller and reinstall Windows Server 2003 and then restore from image.
I primarily want to swap the HDDs out for new, larger drives and create a larger partition for Windows in general. The only catch is that I do not have no where near enough space to install any program to image the system.
What do you guys think?