Perc4/5 Online Array Expansion in a Windows Environment

Reconfigure Virtual Disk Wizard

The Reconfigure Virtual Disk Wizard enables you to change the virtual disk configuration. Using this task, you can change the RAID level or increase the virtual disk size by adding physical disks.

To launch the Reconfigure Virtual Disk Wizard:

1. Expand the Storage tree object to display the controller objects.
2. Expand a controller object.
3. Select the Virtual Disks object.
4. Select Reconfigure from the Available Tasks drop-down menu.
5. Click Execute.
6. Follow the prompts to add the drive(s) to the array

Let the Reconstruct process finish (this can take several hours depending on the size and number of drives added).

You should now see new available space at the end of your disk in Disk Manager.  You may need to ReScan in Disk Manager and on rare occasions reboot the server first.

Expanding an Existing Partition:

NOTES:

Only the LAST partition on a disk can be expanded.  Expansion MUST occur in "contiguous" space on the drive.  If you have two partitions on a drive (or more) and want the expand one of the first partitions you will HAVE to delete the other partitions until the partition that you wish to expand is the last partition.

Deleting partitions is DATA DESRUCTIVE.

DiskPart will NOT expand a partition that holds a pagefile.

DiskPart and ExtPart will NOT work on Dynamic disks.

It is sometimes necessary to perform the expansion in Safe Mode. SBS does not seem to like you doing this live.  Also other installed applications can "lock" the drive/partition so that you can not expand it.  I have never had this fail in Safe Mode.

There are several tools that will expand an existing partition.  I am going to cover DiskPart and ExtPart (readme).  These are not the only tools that will expand a partition - just the ones that I am going to cover.

ExtPart is a very simple command-line program that you can get from Dell (see link above).  The user guide covers this process very well:

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IV. INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS
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To install the utility, perform the following steps:

1) Download the self-extracting executable ExtPart.exe from support.dell.com.
2) Run the self-extracting executable to extract the utility (extpart.exe) to the hard disk of your system. The default extract location is c:\dell\ExtPart.

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V. EXTENDING A BASIC DISK USING EXTPART
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1) From the Start Menu select Run.
2) Type 'cmd' and click OK to run the command line utility.
3) Change directories to c:\dell\ExtPart or the location the utility extpart.exe was extracted.

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VI. USAGE
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extpart [volume size]
volume - the volume to extend. e.g. f:, g:, etc (only basic volumes)
size - the size in megabytes by which to extend the volume.

Example:
To extend the g: volume by 1 GB (1024 MB) use the following command:
extpart g: 1024

DiskPart is just as easy (note that most users use extpart to expand the c: partition as it almost always holds a pagefile and DiskPart will not expand a partition that has a pagefile):

1. At a command prompt, type diskpart.exe. 2. Type list volume to display the existing volumes on the computer. 3. Type Select volume volume number where volume number is number of the volume that you want to extend. 4. Type extend [disk=n] [noerr]. The following describes the parameters:

5.

Type exit to quit Diskpart.exe.

Don't worry about all of the options for diskpart.  You can simply type "extend" and hit enter.  This will by default extend the partition to the maximum available size (all of the free space on the disk).

User Guides:

Perc4: <ADMIN NOTE: Broken link has been removed from this post by Dell>
Perc5:<ADMIN NOTE: Broken link has been removed from this post by Dell>
Server Administrator: <ADMIN NOTE: Broken link has been removed from this post by Dell>

Questions/Comments/Suggestions are welcome!