New Server

I have a server that suddenly rebooted and came back to no disks found. It is an old Dell Windows 2000 Server with raid. The raid card does not see the drives. Fortunately the back up was good.

The money guy approved a new server.

Can I remove the workstations from the old domain when the old server is dead? I think I'll need to create new profiles on each workstation Should I name the new server something different that the old one? I'm not sure that will matter. I need to be able to install the new server and get the workstations to join with the new Server 2003 box that's on the way.

Can someone point me in the right direction?

I think, if you have a good back up, I would be tempted to recreate the old server temporarily and do a proper migration so that the users keep all their settings.

Assuming I can get the old server running, can you point me to a link that would outline the migration process?

It doesn't need to be the original hardware....
server migration tools

As an aside, jimm, I'm curious; have you tested the drives? Don't get me wrong, you should certainly jump on the new server, I just think it's unusual to have multiple drives fail simultaneously. I'm wondering if you have working drives and a bad controller, perhaps.

I think the drives are good. I can boot into the Dell Utility partition. I did a quick test on all the drives. No errors.

The BSOD says to run chkdsk /f. I have had this work on other machines, but in this case I get an error that chkdsk can't run because of errors on the drive.

I'm going to try a repair install of Windows 2000 Server and see if that helps.

The repair install sees the drives but says the partitions are unformatted or damaged.

Look in the raid cards bios, normally ctrl-m for lsi/ami or ctrl-a for adaptec. Look for an option to check consistancy.

You did check that the Bios hadn't been reset to non-raid?

The consistency check seems to have worked. It reported no error, but upon reboot everything went ok. I'm into Windows. Thanks Tommo!

This old server is Running Windows 2000 SBE with Exchange. The users have long stopped using the Exchange for mail. They have just been using pop based accounts on their local machines.

The new server 2003 has no Exchange. What do I need to look out for when running adprep and dcpromo? Will Exchange cause a problem?

Thanks again to everyone.

All went well.

I ran adprep on old, dcpromo on new, moved data, setup files sharing on new, shutdown old, setup dns on new.

Thanks to everyone.

Great!