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Have an old Win2003 server with 1 SCSI hard drive partitioned as follows:

D: boot (includes D:\ntldr, boot.ini, etc.)
C: system (includes C:\WINDOWS)

Want to move the whole system to new hardware with bigger drives and different controllers. Specifically, C: to a 300GB SAS drive, and D: to a 2TB SATA drive.

Tried:

VMWare Converter -> VMWare Server -> Diskpart
Result: Diskpart refuses to resize system or boot disks

VMWare Converter -> VMWare Server -> GParted
Result: Will not boot (see http://serverfault.com/questions/219868/resize-ntfs-system-partitions-with-gparted )

Attach original VMWare disk to a duplicate VMWare install -> Diskpart
Result: Will not boot (goes to Directory Services Restore mode)

Backup Exec System Recovery Server Edition 2010 with Restore Anywhere
(tried restoring both to VMWare and to the bare system, without VMWare)
Update: After editing boot.ini manually with Knoppix (changing the rdisk to 1 instead of 0), it booted, but now I get error **LSASS.EXE System Error - Directory Service cannot start error 0xc00002e1. Press OK to shutdown the system. Use Recovery Console to diagnose further. I went to the Recovery Console but am not sure what to do from here.

Reinstalling Windows from scratch is not an option due to critical custom software heavily embedded on the original machine.

Has anyone been in a similar situation (with unusual boot/system partitions) before and figured out how to resize onto different disks?

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Which VMWare converter did you use? At the virtual data center I work at (which we only use VMWare) we have noticed some issues with some VMWare converters. Try using 4.03, if that doesn't work, try 4.2. – David Jan 14 '11 at 14:29
We're using the latest converter (4.3 I think), and it has no problem converting the disks for VMWare use. In fact, they system boots fine in VMWare. The problem is resizing and getting them to boot after a resize. We don't necessarily have to use VMWare and would actually prefer not to if we could just get the original disk data resized on to new disks and be bootable. – ane Jan 14 '11 at 14:46
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2 Answers

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Paragon has some nice software for this, allows you to migrate a current installation to new hardware. Then use your choice of partitioning software to change partition sizes once it is bootable in the new system.

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/dc-personal/features.html

Scenario 3: Migrate to new hardware

When upgrading to new hardware, clone your existing hard drive to the new one and adjust the OS to make it bootable again

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up vote -1 down vote

I know it's not the fastest/ Best solution, but consider reinstalling / reconfiguring the server from scratch on the new machine. the final result will be the best.

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Wish I could do that, but it's not an option due to critical custom software heavily embedded on the original machine. This custom software would cost tens of thousands of dollars to have reinstalled, and even if money didn't matter, it would take a lot more time than we have. – ane Jan 14 '11 at 14:43
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