***** INFORMATION IS PROVIDED AS IS ***** POTENCIAL DATA LOST MAY OCCUR *****

 

1. Fail one drive at a time and rebuild it with the bigger drive.  Once the rebuild on one drive finishes, do the same with the other drives.  Once all the 3 drives have been rebuilt using the bigger drives,

2. Clear the configuration and creating a new array of the same type and same settings except for the size of the array.  We will have to create an array that will use the whole space of the drives (in our example a 73 GB logical drive).

3. Do not to initialize the logical drive.  If everything goes fine, we should be able to boot into the OS and then use extpart to expand the volumes or just create another volume with the unallocated space.

 

***** INFORMATION IS PROVIDED AS IS ***** POTENCIAL DATA LOST MAY OCCUR *****

Good Info Rapco  thanks ..

 

Can you cleae something up for me?

 

I am about to try this with a CERC ata100/4ch card.

replacing a RAID-5 with 4 80G IDE drives with 4 300G drives. My thought was just blow up the C drive really big but ran into some conflicting info that has me stalled.   

 

1) I was told that you can't increase the system drive using this method.. Is that right? Or will somthing like Extpart work for that? (Win 2000 SBS) I am ok with just adding another volume instead but wanted to be clear about my options.  I also have acces to Acronis but hope to avoid the downtime of entire image restore.

 

2) I assume once you replace the last drive you restart and go to the CARD bios to clear the config is that right?  or are you saying to do that from the Dell Array manager snapin?

 

thanks..

Jeff

Could steps 2 and 3 be expanded a bit more. While I don't plan on doing this right away with my PERC5i and 8*500GB RAID5 array it would be good to reference this when I go to replace all 8 drives with 2TB drives when they eventually become available.