Duplicate and replace small scsi disk with larger one in a novell 3.12 server.

You can either:
Do a full backup with a NETWARE aware backup product.
Swap disks.
Run the 3.12/3/20 install on the new disk
Do a full restore, overwriting everything.

or

Shell out $400 bucks and buy:
http://www.portlocksoftware.com/products/stormgr/stormgr_faq.htm

or

Throw an entire new server at the problem and do an across the wire migration.

Well, cough, be careful here.  

Netware 3.12, this version, has a hidden folder that you can't see and it's quite possible that the Netware backup product won't see the hidden folder.

This folder is important.  It's your license number and controls the number of connections.

Best bet is to save all your data onto a hard disk on a local machine.  It's only 2.1 Gb.

Then do a new install with the new hard disk.  Best check the dos partition on the hard disk cause you'll quite probably need to examine the config.sys and autoexec.bat file there and copy the drivers referenced to a floppy disk.  You'll probably need them for the new scsi disk.

Once the install is done then restore all the data from the local hard disk.

You'll also need to note down the login script on the old hard disk and rights given to users and assigned to folders and files.  This can be messy.

But I'm going to recommend you call the local Novell agents and get them to do it.  May be pricey but they should be able to do it properly for you.

And also pose this question in our Novell forum here at EE.

http://oldlook.experts-exchange.com/Networking/Netware/

Post a zero point question there and ask them to look at this question

http://oldlook.experts-exchange.com/questions/20822400/Duplicate-and-replace-small-scsi-disk-with-larger-one-in-a-novell-3-12-server.html

for their comments.  Ignore any comment about updating your server to a later Novell version.  They have a habit of doing that.

>This folder is important.  It's your license number and controls the number of connections.
This is in the server executable in the DOS partition.

>Best bet is to save all your data onto a hard disk on a local machine.  It's only 2.1 Gb.
You'd lose all rights masks by doing that

Correct.  I am thinking of Netware 4.

Netware 3 is pretty straighforward, only the bindery files are open and any decent backup closes them and backs them up fine. Run bindfix twice before you backup and you'll have another copy in the sys/system: just in case.

I was hoping to just duplicate the whole hard disk and swap it out - doesnt norton ghost do this?

I was thinking of less downtime for the company I work for..

there was a version of ghost for netware, but they don't list it on their site anymore that I can find.

discontinued:
http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ghost.nsf/docid/2001040310461125

Ok, does anyone know of any other software I can use to duplicate the disk, so I can just swap it?

Thanks mate - I'm bidding on ebay for this product at the moment!

Any other comments welcome!

As far as the largest hard drive that NetWare 3.12 can handle, gee...

There is a way to have "large" hard drives supported by 3.12.  I don't remember how.  Without futzing, you can support 8GB drives.  I think there's a way to get beyond that, too, but I've never tried, myself - I was on 4.11 before drives gpt that big and was on 6.x before SCSI even made it as big as 36 GB.

If you want to support hundreds of gigabytes, up to terabytes, with no problesm, you will want to upgrade your OS to NetWare 6.x.

That might not be such a bad idea in any case.  If you are an educational institution, upgrade licensing from Novell is dirt cheap in comparison to commercial pricing.

If you must stay with 3.12 on your old server for some reason, then you might want to check the used market for 4.8GB SCSI drives; 9.6 GB max.  A server that old won't likely support anything bigger - SCSI II max, likely, and very unlikely to support EIDE.

Speaking of SCSI II -

Whatever larger drive you get has to be compatible with the SCSI (assuming SCSI) controller you have.

Don't go out and get a SCSI-160 or UW-SCSI disk if your controller is FW-SCSI II.

If this is a stopgap-measure thing, with the intent of upgrading your hardware and OS (sticking with NetWare!!!) then you should do the ebay thing looking for a compatible SCSI drive in the 4-9GB size range.  You could, in fact, simply add another HDD to your SCSI bus, and concatenate that drive with the original, rather than doing a swap-out.  The problem with doing that is that if one drive goes, the whole volume goes.

Netware 3.12 (3.2) can support 32 terrabytes (theroetically). The problem is mounting the volume.
M=0.023xVolume Size in MB / Block Size (default for block = 4) for DOS volumes
(mac and os/2 name spaces take additional memory)
so say 70MB per 10GB volume with the default 4k block
400MB is maximum amount of ram you can use so you can see you'd need some pretty big blocks for 32Tb.
Netware doesn't use the bios, so ide drives will work but even the shipping drivers on v4 only supported 8gb drives, scsi will be a lot less of a headache.

Like I said... without futzing...  hehe.

Also, you're talking volume size vs disk size, and when 3.12 was "the thing", a 4.3GB SCSI drive was really huge...  I mentioned the concatenation of drives into a single volume (which, I think, is RAID 0) but it isn't necessarily something I'd recommend.

You can get a big scsi drive and make the netware partition just the size you need, you don't need to partition the whole thing. You don't need to do raid0, netware will very handily span volumes over partitions(on the fly), and will also just as handily dump you data down the dustbin if either goes south.

Like I indicated, I was "living in the past."  Waaaay back when, when I actually *used* 3.12, a 4.3GB SCSI HDD was considered "whoppin' big."  Heck, Mainframe DASD wasn't much bigger back then.

I don't think IDE had even made it to 512 MB yet.

Remember, we're talking about 10+ year old technology here...

If you want to put a "big" SCSI drive in this 3.12 box, you have to make sure it will work with the SCSI controller you have.  If it won't, you have to find a SCSI controller that will work in that box and will support that drive, AND has drivers available for 3.12.

It actually might be cheaper to buy a 5-year-old Pentium II PC with plenty of RAM and an EIDE controller, and get a couple of 40GB IDE hard drives, and move the whole shot to that box, and mirror the drives.  You'd probably end up with a more robust system with fewer headaches.  Provded, of course, that you could find appropriate drivers for the hardware.

Even better, get a new desktop system - it will probably come with 512 MB DDR RAM and a 120-GB HDD, and will cost less than the old 3.12 server did originally - and shell out a couple of bux for an upgrade to a supported version of NetWare (at least 5.1) - and then do an across-the-wire migration from the old one to the new one.

>Comment from chicagoan
>Date: 12/10/2003 06:45PM EST

>Throw an entire new server at the problem and do an across the wire migration.
yup
 

Like you said...

What I find humorous is that this "hardware" question would never EVER have arisen for a Microsoft OS.

Like that envious Energizer Bunny says, "NetWare keeps going, and going, and going..."

We had a 3.11 server that was up for over 1900 days till someobdy kicked the power cord last feb.
AST Premium 486 32M w/ 4 Storage dimension 2Gb drives raid5 w/hot spare.
When it was replaced I left it running and the sys vol in the weekly backup (all 200mb) just to see when it would die.

I wrote up a procedure for doing this at:

http://www.thedurlands.com/nov312mo.html

hth

I have purchased servermagic 3.0 from ebay.

I'll try it out and let you guys know how it went for me !

Many thanks for all your help thus far!

trixy