Extend Volume - Problem

Hi,

 

I have a PE2650 running Windows 2000 Server with (4) 36gb drives connected to a PERC 3/Di. It is configured for RAID 5. The drives were in slots 0:0,0:1,0:2 & 0;4. 0:4 was the hot spare. Unfortunately, the vendor that did the install initially, before I joined the company, configured it as a single volume.

 

The system volume is running out of space, so I purchased an additional 36gb drive and it was installed in slot 3. I now have (2) issues -

 

1. I reconfigured the RAID volume to add the additional drive (0:3), so my RAID volume is now ~101gb instead of ~67gb. However, the system volume did not expand, so it is only using ~67gb of the available 101gb. Also, my Hot spare went away. It's now listed as array disk 0:4, with the space unallocated. I understand that resizing the system partition is a Microsoft problem and that I would need to purchase a 3rd party utility to expand the volume. Rather than doing that, I want to create a new data volume using the ~34gb of available space on the RAID 5 volume. I can't figure out how to do that.

 

2. The drive in slot 4, which was the hot spare, is now listed as an array disk when I expand the Backplane (channel 0) in the Array Manager. It is NOT listed as being part of Virtual Disk 0. When I right click on Virtual Disk 0 | Configure Hot Spare, no drives are listed. What do I need to do to make the drive available as the hot spare again?

 

Thanks.

 

John