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Can I shrink a logical drive, and not the extended partition, to do a bare metal restore to a smaller drive?
The current configuration is a Dell T310, with an S300 controller, with all 4 hot-swap slots filled with SAS drives. The operating system is SBS 2008 (2008 Server/Vista) I plan to change the controller from S300 (software) controller, to an H700 (hardware) controller. My concern is the H700 reports the drives slightly smaller in size.
The typical Dell layout is diagnostic partition, followed by a Recovery (E:) partition, followed by the System (C:) partition, followed by an extended partition with a logical volume (D:). If I use Diskpart to shrink the D: "partition", it will leave me with free space, not unallocated space. Thus, it actually shrinks the logical drive, and the extended partition remains the same size as it was, with no means to shrink it.
The question is, if I shrink the D: logical drive, and not the extended partition, and then get system backups, will I be able to a bare metal restore to the smaller virtual drive of the H700?
JToering
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May 20th, 2014 19:00
This is what I did:
- Pulled out the S300 controller and the 4, 450GB 15,000 RPM Cheetahs RAID-5
- Replaced them with the H700 controller and 2, 2TB 7200 RPM Constellations in RAID-1
Results:
- Eliminated the possibility of running into a disk space problem during the restore
- Expanded the amount of disk space available.
- Left me with 2 open hard drive bays for future expansion.
DELL-Chris H
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March 25th, 2014 08:00
Jtoering,
The H700 isn't displaying it as smaller, it is utilizing more room for the configuration data.
Let me ask you this. Where are you trying to put the additional space? Also, what is the current raid layout, drive sizes?
I ask as there are things we can do under different circumstances. Such as removing the utility partition to extend the C: drive. Which we would have to use Extpart to extend the disk with the new space.
Let me know and we can go from there.
JToering
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April 3rd, 2014 19:00
>Let me ask you this. Where are you trying to put the additional space?<
After the last partition, the D volume
>Also, what is the current raid layout, drive sizes?<
RAID-5, 4, 450GB Seagate SAS 15K drives. (1.2TB)