Transfer WHS2011 From HP N40L MicroServer To Dell T20

[jimborae]

Hi bit of an odd one as it both hardware & software related. Basically I want to retire my HP N40L microserver and move everything to a new, faster Dell T20 server but I don't want to reinstall my WHS 2011 setup as it will be a major ball ache and there will be a lot of downtime (even though there's no time critical stuff on it).

So my question is can it be done???

I have two raid 1 arrays on it, one is set up on a HP P212 SmartArray hardware raid card the other is on the built in (software raid) of the HP. I'm hoping the HP hardware raid card array will just be a case of unplug from one machine and transfer to the other, the software one I'm sure will be lost so I'll have to replicate the folders & transfer the data from a backup. But it's really the OS I'm more concerned about, in this situation with Win 7 I'd just image the OS drive on to a new disk and boot up in safe mode and then install the new drivers - 50% of the time this works fine and I know it's not the "correct" way to do it but needs must and all that. However I've no experience of doing this with Win server OS's so are there any gotchas I don't know about and am I on a hiding to nothing???


Cheers

Jim

[Splash]

As far as I'm aware there was no Retail release of WHS2011 - it's all OEM so you're probably not actually entitled to do what you're trying to do.

That said: which array is your OS installed to?

[jimborae]

The os is on neither it's on a separate ssd.

[Splash]

In that case you *should* be fine with what you suggest. As always, backup before doing anything!

[GoNz0]

Try the trial of Macrium as it allows recovering to dissimilar hardware.

[jimborae]

Macrium worked a treat unlike Acronis, however it turned out may HP P212 raid card is an issue as it's not detected by the T20 in it's bios. Seems like I need to get a dell raid card so have gone for a Dell Perc H310 and I'll have to transfer all the raid volumes data across. Not what I'd hope for.

[GoNz0]

Macrium worked a treat unlike Acronis, however it turned out may HP P212 raid card is an issue as it's not detected by the T20 in it's bios. Seems like I need to get a dell raid card so have gone for a Dell Perc H310 and I'll have to transfer all the raid volumes data across. Not what I'd hope for.

Did you enable the pcie slot?
I think it's off by default.

Sent from my SM-G920F

[jimborae]

Did you enable the pcie slot?
I think it's off by default.

Sent from my SM-G920F

Yep PCIE slots were enabled and working, I had a gpu in the 16x slot prior to this. Also had the bios set to legacy mode rather than UEFI so that cant be the issue either. I did a quick bit of reseaerch late last night and it would appear that this isn't uncommon for another oem make of raid card to be ignored with Dell.