I've been using the SME Server since e-smith 5.1.2 and this weekend retired my two oldest remaining installs, a 5.5 and a 5.6. Both had been running happily in server-only mode for years (with uptimes in both cases of many, many months), but after a certain amount of time I get nervous about the hard drives & wanted to replace preemptively.
First case: 5.5 running on mirrored 40-gigabyte drives. I cut straight to the chase on this one, as its setup was very simple with few accounts, no contribs and no php apps or anything of that sort. I just copied the contents of the ibays, installed new drives and 7.0, then manually replicated the old setup (yes, I know about the lazy admin tools but didn't use 'em) and restored the data.
The second machine was another story: 5.6 on a single-drive HP tc2100 (client wouldn't pay for mirrored drives at the time). I Ghosted the 30-gig drive to a 120-gig drive, keeping /swap and /boot the same and expanding /. 5.6 hung with a kernel panic; I booted a Knoppix CD and e2fscked the drive, which straightened out some stuff including removing the ext3 journal. So I used the 5.6 boot floppy (remember those?) to boot the machine, then tune2fs -j /dev/hda to make a new journal. Voila, it booted. So I upgraded, first to 6.0.01, then to 7.0 final. All was well! I then figured that I'd just use the "manage disk redundancy" console entry to add a mirror.
Nope. "No RAID devices found." No way around it that I could see, and no time for much research for a server I had to put back into production for Monday morning. (And I did raise the issue in the Bug Tracker, in #959 if you're interested.)
So what I did was copy off the many gigabytes of data files, bringing the total down to where I could use "backup to desktop". I then wiped and rebuilt 7.0 final on mirrored 120GB Seagate drives (5-yr warranty, w00t), restored from desktop and that was that.
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