Basic to GPT disk

Good day All,

Welcome back!!! recently we had a request to add additional 1 TB of space to a already existing     1.5 TB of basic disk and its virtual machine.
Lot of guys may be thing what is the issue here and why we need a post for this?
well i have seen still lot of Admins do the mistake of just extending disk beyond 2 TB and struggle to understand why disk is not extending beyond 2 TB,
If you have read my first sentence there is answer to it, well i said this a Basic disk and Basic disk can't be extended beyond 2 TB so we need to convert to either GPT disk or add new disk and make the disk as dynamic.

Dynamic disk : Well even MS does't recommend this on new OS like 2008/2012 and disk performance are not that great.

GPT disk - is the way to go for performance and further growth but we will have to format the drive and restore the data.

After some discussion we decided that as this is File share drive,sighting performance and future growth we decided to go with GPT and wanted to come with a plan so that downtime for this is as minimal as possible.


Pre-Task we performed:

1. Took File share permission screenshots
2.Registry backup was taken as all the file share permission are present in case we have to revert or apply it
3.a New 2.5 TB GPT disk was created and attached to a Server let says name as B in the same ESXi Farm
4.we started a Robocopy batch script with below details from Source Server disk to GPT disk in Server B on the destination Server B.

ROBOCOPY /e /xj /ZB /r:2 /w:5 /LOG+:"C:\Log.txt" /it /purge /copyall Source_Path Destination_Path

@Echo Copying Complete
Pause 

Syntax:
/E :: copy subdirectories, including Empty ones.
/XJ :: eXclude Junction points. (normally included by default).

/ZB :: use restartable mode; if access denied use Backup mode.

 /R:n :: number of Retries on failed copies: default 1 million.

/W:n :: Wait time between retries: default is 30 seconds.

/IT :: Include Tweaked files.

/COPYALL :: COPY ALL file info (equivalent to /COPY:DATSOU)- Includes all Security Permissions.

5. 1.5 TB of data copy took about 15 hrs
6.A day before cutover we did one more incremental Robocopy and synced all the new changes and it took us about 30 mints

Steps performed during the cut-over:

1.Go to shares and close all the open shares for the drive
2.Initiated a Final Sync so that we are not missing new changes, it took about 15 mints
3. Removed the  1.5 TB disk from edit settings on the properties of the VM
4.Removed the 2.5 TB disk from destination VM and noted down the path
5.On the Source Server in edit settings given the new path to 2.5 TB disk
6.went to disk management on the Source Server scanned for new drive.
7.It automatically assigned a new driver letter E
8.So we changed the driver letter from E to original F and all the share permission got applied to drive

I have seen lot of people getting confused, please note Robocopy will only carry Security permission if required all the share permission you will have to manually assign to Shares.

As the registry settings was having all the sharing details as soon as changed the drive letter it took the Share permissions automatically and we didn't had to give anything.

The whole downtime for the post steps was like 45 mints and Server was up.

If anyone has a better way of doing it please share.
So we are at end of this article hopefully this helps someone, until next one you all a good day!!!!!!!!!!!