Effectively clone the hard drive by using mirrored partitions in Win Server 2008

For the most part a 'corrupt partition' is actually referring to a corrupted filesystem. Filesystems are contained within partitions(1). So if the filesystem in one partition gets corrupted, the filesystems in different partitions on the same disk will not be. That said, the same event (abrupt power-down, others) that corrupted one filesystem can also corrupt other filesystems on the same disk.

Actually corrupting a filesystem takes some doing these days. I've seen some pretty bad NTFS pukes, but they were all related to exceptional events. A good way to cause problems is to yank the powercables out the back of a Windows server while it's doing heavy I/O. For SAN-attached storage (not your problem) sometimes if the SAN hiccups for some reason the OS can react strangely; I had a case on Server 2003 where just such a hiccup caused Windows to flag about 20GB of the partition as bad-clusters (they weren't, a chkdsk /F /R removed the bad-flag from those clusters). Abrupt power loss is probably the most common cause of such problems. Having your drive partitioned so that your heavy I/O applications are on a different partition than your OS boot environment means that when the power is yanked the chances of boot being affected are much smaller.

(1) Unless they're part of a volume management system like LVM, or Microsoft Dynamic Disks, at which point things get a bit fuzzier.

Totally love this question - thanks for asking it!

Now I have a cunning plan - take this time to virtualise and make all future work super-easy.

The plan would be to get a temporary/rented server, install basic (free) ESXi onto it, take your server down for a few hours and convert the current server to a VM on the ESXi box, install the vmtools and test it while isolated from your real users.

If this testing goes well you can schedule to do the same thing again, but for real this time!

What you'd do is shutdown your server again, convert it to a VM again but then remove all of your disks and set them aside as a fall-back option. Then add the extra CPU/memory/cache and create your new array on your new disks. Install ESXi on this new array and simply copy the VM from the temp ESXi box to the newly upgraded one, start it and install the vmtools.

If all goes well then you should see a huge performance increase from the extra CPU, memory and disks - yes you'll lose a few percent of that performance to the virtualisation layer but now you'll have an easily transported server that can be moved, upgraded etc. as it'll be encapsulated inside a VM. If it goes badly simply re-insert the old disks and you're back to where you were.

Does this sound feasible? I know you don't have the budget for paid support from VMWare but your setup would be super-easy and we could help with the config of this if you had specific questions, plus you get to 'play' with this temp server anyway - don't forget that temp machine doesn't have to have oceans of CPU, memory or disk performance, just enough to hold the new VM.

Hope this helps.