ghosted win2k svr, now have service starting issues

[jungle]

goal: take machine from a single drive to a raid 5

background:
I upgraded a server for a remote office last week, one of my umm.....lesser knowledgeable admins takes care of this box, so it is pretty messed up to begin with. It is Win2k svr w/ sp4, a promise fasttrak tx2 with a single ide drive w/ 2 partitions. It was slow and flakey to begin with.

method:
I installed the sx4000 drivers, physically installed the 3 drives and raid card, setup the array, rebooted into dos, used ghost 2003 to clone from the single drive to the array. Ghost does see the Raid5 in dos, so it works...but it is really slow (50mb/min!!!!). After waiting 10hours for it to complete, remove single drive, reboot, do an fdisk /mbr, all seems well.

problem:
all seems fine, but the ghosted raid is even slower than the single drive setup. Infact, 3 of the Oracle Instances, and the Watchguard service software on thier all fail to start up, they get time-out error messages. So it takes the machine nearly 20minutes for it to boot up, log in, fail on all the services, and become useable. After all that, if i manually start the services, they start fine.

any ideas?
-is thier some issue w/ ghosting oracle?
-is thier some issue w/ ghosting w/ partitions?
-is thier some issue w/ moving oracle to a raid?

TIA!!!!

 

[Sianath]

There may or may not be issues with ghosting to a raid disk based on how the image was taken. If it was sector by sector, the layout of the partition data may not line up well with the stripe size of the raid set, causing your disk to check two stripes for a single stripe's worth of data.

Unless some ghost experts show up with a neat solution (since I know little about the product itself) your best option might be to back up the data, recreate the partition on your new raid set, and then restore the data.

At least then you know you are getting a decent physical layout of your partition on disk.

 

[Agamar]

Yep, a backup and restore would work wonders there.

 

[jungle]

thanks for the replys....interesting idea....

If it means anything to you, the original drive was a 40gb, and it went to 3 120gb drives (apx 225gb). With ghost i didn't do any fancy switches, i just used the menu. The raid was configured w/ 32k sectors.

 

[mikecel79]

We had setup an Exchange server for temporary use during my employer's consolidation of builings last year that used a Promise controller like the one you are talking about. We has 128MB of memory on the card also. In Win2k Server this thing was a DOG. It was slow as dirt and would cause the machine to temporarily freeze up for about 15 seconds at a time. The server was a PIII Dual 800, 1GB RAM, 3 40GB drives.

Once we were done with the server we used the same machine but installed Win2k Pro on it and it flies now! No performance problems at all with it. So you may be running into that issue as well as Norton does not support putting an image back onto a RAID array.