Increase C: (system) partition of a PERC 4/DC virtual disk?

Swapping the 4 drives (one at a time) will not allow you to do this as the virtual disk can only be resized (grown) by adding more drives to the raid set.

So with the 4-disk limit, you'll have to

- back up your data

- update all drivers and firmware (most compatible with newer drives)

- run another backup (image type backup is easiest)

- shut down

- pull the 4 existing drives and mark where they came from (slot/cable)

- put in the 4 new drives

- go into the PERC bios and create a new raid set

- boot to the recovery media for your image-type backup application

- restore the C-partition and resize it to a desired size (leave enough space for the D-partition)

- restore the D-partition and resize it to a desired size

If the restore fails (for whatever reason), you can shut down, put the original 4 drives back in, power up and be back where you started (within 10 minutes probably).

there's a 4 disk limit on the PERC 4/DC?

edit: looks like I have a 5th drive acting as a global hot spare on the backplane, can re-assign this disk from hotspare to an actual RAID disk and grow the virtual disk?

This would make it a 5 disk array... does the PERC have a 4 disk array limit?

edit 2: I've been playing around in Open Manage and it looks like it is possible to add this 5th drive to the RAID5 array if I goto virtual disk and reconfigure. I didn't do it yet but just wanted to come here and check, is it possible? If so, I'll probably get a 6th disk to fill up the backplane and add it too.

so I could add the 5th and 6th disk to the RAID 5 array? 

Just not sure afterwards if I can extend my C: partition, might have to use something like Acronis?

No. There's no 4-disk limit (unless you're server has no more drive slots available). I meant by the 4-drive limit; if you don't want to add drives to the existing raid set (same size drives), but upgrade all existing drives to larger ones.

After you add the extra drives to the raid set (make sure you stay below 2TB, but I don't think you could exceed it with 6 SCSI drives anyway) you can extend the last partition on the disk 'for free' using diskpart, but to extend the C-drive if there's a partition behind it (e.g. D-drive), you'll indeed need something like Acronis Disk Director to move the D-drive up so you can resize the C-drive.

Dev Mgr, when I insert the new drives into the system, can I just hot-insert them while the system is on? Will Dell Open Manage see them after I do that?

Assuming your system has the hotswap backplane (for the SCSI drives), you can indeed hotplug the drives. If you have a cabled setup (cable going from drive to drive (and at the end a terminator on the cable), you'll have to power down the server to add the drives.

Look into software like Symantec Ghost (Symantec bought Norton a couple of years ago, so you may know this product as Norton Ghost) or Acronis True Image.

You install the software and run a backup of your C-drive and put it on a share or maybe a USB drive or so. Once you have the new raid in place, boot to the media that your backup software offers (True Image allows you to build bootable media after you install this software, but not sure about Ghost). Boot to this, point it to the share or USB drive (the ability to access a share may depend on the version you purchase), and restore it on the new raid set.

when I'm doing the c: restore, will ghost/true image handle the allocation of the c: partition? or do I have to allocate/partition the space before I do the restore?

True image backs up the partition, so when you restore the partition, you get the choice which partition size you want to use; smaller (in case you initially made it too big and have a lot of blank space), same size, or larger.