Manual Hardware Migration

Life is full of many twists and turns. Its funny, I operate in a strange way. I was completely set on doing a swing migration, I even had an approved purchase order! But then I decided I would just go ahead with a manual transfer.

Here's why:
1. I have to transfer less than 10 computer workstations overall
2. The only critical transfer components include two network drives, exchange server, and some printers. (and some local profiles but who's counting)
3. Our old server is slightly fritzy so a fresh install will prevent any bad settings from being transferred
4. I get paid by the hour to do stuff cheaply

So if you find yourself in the same boat as me, I suggest you go ahead with a manual reinstall. Especially if your users are flexible and don't mind having to reset their desktop backgrounds. Even if they do mind a little bit, you can save 200+ dollars, so who cares!? If you aren't in the same boat as I am, go ahead and get the swing kit. Everybody mentions it so it must be good. I'm just lucky because I don't have to be consistent.

Basically the manual transfer boils down to about 4-5 steps... with several substeps of course!

1) Install a fresh copy of SBS 2003 on your new hardware
2) Update and prep
3) Transfer network drives, email profiles, user profiles, and printers
4) Transfer user computers to new domain
5) Test and troubleshoot user problems

I bet you're wondering how each of these steps breaks down. Funny, cause I was just wondering the same thing. Honestly you can only find bits and pieces of each step scattered across the web. Hopefully I can bring some, if not most of these steps together in this blog so you can benefit from my suffering.

I'll go ahead and post separate posts for each of the steps so the organization is a bit better.

Thanks for reading!