PE1850 Array Expansion

Question

Hi All,   I have recently upgraded the RAID1 set in my 1850 from 72Gb to 300Gb disks...everything worked a treat except Array Manager didn't see all the unpartitioned space on Disk 0.  A reboot fixed that problem.   I now want to expand the Virtual Disk to use the whole 300Gb, but can't find a way (even in Server Administrator 5.0.0) to expand the array.   If I delete the Virtual Disk, recreate with same settings and use all the drive space (no initialisation) will this work?  I've heard the theory but never seen in practice.   The RAID Controller is a PERC 4e/Si.   Thanks. M

Mark_A_Smith · Answer

Replacing smaller disks with larger disks will NOT give you the option to use the unused space on the larger drives.  The only way to do this is create the array from scratch on the new larger disks and restore the data from backup.

Maestro2 · Answer

All fixed! There is a procedure for achieving this as it seems Dell Controllers don't support automated array expansion of this nature. I followed the procedure and the space became available to the OS as 'unallocated'. I then used Dell's extpart utility which worked amazingly fast.

Downtime was minimal (I did the Virtual Disk re-creation at BIOS level as I didn't want to run the risk of the Windows tools doing something I didn't intend to do).

All told, time spent was around 10 mins (of my time and effort) plus the 2.5 hours for each drive to re-establish the mirror.

Cheers,
Mark

zuzzu · Answer

Maestro2,

I am looking at replacing 3 16GB drives raid5 with 3 36GB drives on a production server. Could you detail your process? I think I can remove a 16GB, add a 36GB, rebuild, and repeat until all 3 new drives are in. Then use diskpart to allow the OS to gain back the new space? Is that what you did?

PowerEdge HDD/SCSI/RAID

PE1850 Array Expansion

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