Migrate Easy 7.0 and Windows Server 2003 SBS

Hi Guys,

I had a need to migrate a machine running Windows Server 2003 SBS to a different disk (IDE to SCSI). On workstations I tend to use Ghost, but its not happy on Windows Server 2003. I noted that Migrate Easy 7.0 lists Windows Server 2003 as being supported so I grabbed the trial version to see how it would go.

I was initially disappointed that the Restore CD component doesn't actually work. Sure you can create one, and you can boot from it in order to verify that it can access your disks, but it doesn't actually "do it".

Anyway, I went ahead and installed Migrate Easy 7.0 and all seemed well. I cloned my existing drive to the new drive but did not disconnect the old one, simply changed the boot order in BIOS. It booted from the target drive and all seemed well UNTIL the scheduled backup FAILED. The message in the log indicated that the Volume Shadowing Server returned an error. GREAT!

I then displayed properties for my disks and clicked on the "Shadow Copies" tab and it also indicated that the service returned an error so it could not display details. I'm not actually running Shadow Copies on my shares so its not an imposition, but the fact that my backup process was now broken is an issue.

Ok, bad things happen, so I changed my BIOS and booted from my original drive ... it also displayes the same problem ... conclusion ... Migrate Easy 7.0 has broken Volume Shadowing on Windows Server 2003 SBS.

All was not lost. My original boot drive was an IDE disk so I'd taken the precaution of hooking it up to a workstation and making a Ghost image of it BEFORE installing Migrate Easy 7.0 (Demo). I restored my disk with Ghost, put it back in the machine and all was well ... "Shadow Copies" displays details and NTBackup did its thing.

I went through the cloning process several times but each time the result was the same ... conclusion ... Migrate Easy 7.0 breaks Volume Shadowing on Windows Server 2003 SBS.

Since my original plan was to perform the exercise when booted from a CD I bought a copy of Migrate Easy 7.0, created a Boot CD, put everything back with the aid of Ghost and then cloned my IDE disk to a SCSI disk with the Migrate Easy 7.0 CD. This time all is well.

So is Migrate Easy 7.0 really compatible with Windows Server 2003 SBS (SP2)?