Two disks to four disk RAID10

Hi folks,

I've got a server that's set up with two single 1TB drives in. One drive has windows server on and one drive has files on, these are currently backed up to a NAS. I want to install two extra 1TB drives and make a RAID10 array.

What's the best solution to back up the existing drives with the OS and files on? I considered using clonezilla but that wouldn't allow allow me to restore two partitions to a single drive, even if I partitioned the drive.

I'm not sure what solutions I have, I need to remove the data from the drives, put RAID10 in place and then restore the data.

Thank you.

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I was going to suggest Clonezilla myself; in theory it should work but you'd probably have to separately restore MBR data etc to make the drive boot correctly. And TBH I've found it can be a temperamental at times anyway (when using it I'd suggest keeping a copy of the exact version you use next to the backup - sometimes newer versions won't restore correctly or even boot correctly on hardware the old version worked fine on).

What about something like this? http://www.easeus.com/backup-software/tb-free.html

Just copy the files off the second drive (robocopy) or use windows backup. If there is no OS or bootloader to deal with, an image isn't needed.

Thank you both.

watercooled - I did head down the MBR root, and I don't know a lot about it, but I was unsuccessful in a few attempts, got close once or twice though.

shaithis - The second drive is a pure file server and contains backups of each machine, but again these are just files. If I was to just copy the files and then create this partition on the new RAID array would it be a simple as just restoring them and windows will pickup where it left off?

Thanks

You just have to make sure any method you use for copying files preserves permissions and metadata, is able to access all system files (Windows can be vary awkward about this), and for creating a like-for-like copy you'll want to ensure symbolic links are copied, not followed (/sl flag in Robocopy).

And depending on the version of Windows Server you're using, you might have to copy over a system partition at the start of the drive, and ensure boot sectors and flags are set up correctly.

I've cloned Linux system partitions like this many times but personally I find cloning tools less problematic on Windows. YMMV.

Generally servers have the boot drives in raid 1 and then the remaining disks [data] in a raid 5 / 6 / 10 config to make the best use.

This was a consideration, the server only has 5 SATA ports, one is occupied by the CD/DVD drive. I don't really want to get a SATA/RAID card, but I do understand the logic.