Skip to main content
Start a Conversation

Unsolved

This post is more than 5 years old

cws_at_cws.biz

3 Posts

5548

October 2nd, 2006 22:00

Enlarging a Hardware RAID5 array without reformatting?

Hi ,
We currently have a dell poweredge 1800, with a perc 4/SC running 4x146gb 15k drives in raid5 managed by the perc card.
within windows the container is seen as 420gb or so,  and setup as a dynamic disk with a c: of 20gb and the rest as a d: volume .   But running out of room quickly.
 
on our previous dell we had a raid 1 os drive and then a raid 5 array, so adding more disks to the raid 5 was a case of copying current data to tape, putting it in re-formatting the data drive and copying back.
now that everything is on the raid 5 this is a touch more difficult esp using dynamic volumes.
 
is there anyway to simply expand the raid5 container using the perc controller and then re-sizeing the dynamic volume in windows?
or will we need to
a)do a full system backup to tape, enlarge , do a base install, do a full restore
b) shell out for acronis/ghost and do a drive mirror onto a sata drive and back again.
 
 

countryman73460

81 Posts

October 3rd, 2006 21:00

If you are wanting to add to D: and it is the last partition, then you can add the extra drives to the arrays and then extend the last partition using the unallocated space that has been created. Del Extpart is located at the following link: ftp://ftp.dell.com/app/ExtPart.exe Directions to use are the following link: ftp://ftp.dell.com/app/ExtPart.txt

Now if it's C: you're wanting to add more room to, I would backup everything, clear the configuration, add the drives and recreate.

Whatever you attempt, backup first....

Was this post helpful?

View All

No Events found!

Top