Swapping out Drives on our production SQL Server this weekend

[Travis L. Alltop]

All,

To make a long story short, we are swapping out the "knock-off" drives
that the NA purchased on E-Bay in one of our production SQL Servers
(SQL Server 2000 Enterprise) this weekend for brand new ones (Compaq
15K RPM 32GB drives). We are currently experiencing ASR almost on a
daily basis and it is really causing a disription in service. SO, The
Network Admin ahs made this decison to replace these drives in attempt
to solve this. These new drives will be imaged with ALL of the current
data on the "knock-off' drives and will be plugged back in to this
database server and brought back up .This Server also happens to
currently be a subscriber in Merge Replication as well. Besides
stopping replication to this subscriber is there any other tasks that
I need to do or concerns that I need to be knowledgable about or look
for when we bring this database server backup on line this weekend?
Thanks Travis. :)

[Simon Hayes]

Re: Swapping out Drives on our production SQL Server this weekend

talltop@rairtec h.com (Travis L. Alltop) wrote in message news:<26185179. 0311050738.47d1 8c94@posting.go ogle.com>...[color=blue]
> All,
>
> To make a long story short, we are swapping out the "knock-off" drives
> that the NA purchased on E-Bay in one of our production SQL Servers
> (SQL Server 2000 Enterprise) this weekend for brand new ones (Compaq
> 15K RPM 32GB drives). We are currently experiencing ASR almost on a
> daily basis and it is really causing a disription in service. SO, The
> Network Admin ahs made this decison to replace these drives in attempt
> to solve this. These new drives will be imaged with ALL of the current
> data on the "knock-off' drives and will be plugged back in to this
> database server and brought back up .This Server also happens to
> currently be a subscriber in Merge Replication as well. Besides
> stopping replication to this subscriber is there any other tasks that
> I need to do or concerns that I need to be knowledgable about or look
> for when we bring this database server backup on line this weekend?
> Thanks Travis. :)[/color]

In theory, as long as you stop MSSQL, then image the drives, there
shouldn't be a problem (assuming that you're not also renaming the
server, changing domains, or doing anything beyond a disk copy).

However, if your drives are suspect, then how do you know that the
imaged copy will be good? If the source is unreliable, then the copy
could be too. So I'd definitely make a backup or two to completely
separate media and verify them, just in case...

Simon