Upgrade Raid-5 Array

Use diskpart, you can download it here: http://download.microsoft.com/download/win2000platform/DiskPart/1.00.0.1/nt5/en-us/DiskPart_setup.exe  

The command you're intrested in is below.

 

The EXTEND command will cause the current in-focus volume to be extended into contiguous unallocated space. The unallocated space must follow (be of higher sector offset than) the in-focus partition. The intended use of this command is to grow an existing basic data partition into newly created space on an extended hardware RAID LUN.

No,

 

  The extra space he's talking about is not currently configured in a logical drive and thus is not being reported to the O/S.

 

 I've posted several times on creating multiple logical drives on 1 set of physical drives, it's very bad news when it's time to replace or rebuild drives, it makes it very hard to recover from a condition where different drives are offline in each logical drive.

 

 That being said, go into the controller BIOS and see if it will allow you to create a second logical drive from the unused space on the drives. Once that is done, you can proceed with the Diskpart utility.

 

  Of course I'd perfer you to back up everything, delete the logical drive, recreate a new logical drive using nearly all the space, reinstall the O/S then restore from the backup.

 

Regards,

Dell-GaryS

Hi Jedimarq,

 

   Yes, using the controller BIOS OR a RAID management utility, (there are several different ones out there) would be creating a second logical drive. None of them will be able to reconfigure the existing array to use all of the available hard drive capacity.

 

  "Free space" is a bit ambiguous, it can mean either the unpartitioned capacity in a logical drive, or the unpartitioned capacity on a physical drive. In the case of a single drive that is in a system without RAID, they both mean the same thing, however the basic thing to remember about RAID controllers is that the controller reports only logical drives to the O/S. The O/S cannot see or use additional capacity on the hard drives unless the controller organizes this space as a logical drive.

 

Regards,

Dell-GaryS

Hi Jedimarq,

 

   Sorry, I've never used it myself, rather I do the backup and restore to the new array that's the correct size. I'm sure that there are others that can advise you on it. Or you can read your readme's or help files on Diskpart.

 

Regards,

Dell-GaryS

Did you "initialize" the DISK 1?

As GaryS correctly corrected me (i've been playing with SAN's too much), diskpart cant extend a virtual disk. It is good for extending volumes that have a small partition and then free space. The normal occurance would be using the Dell server cd to load an os, you select maximum for the disk size but select the default for the windows install. THe windows install defaults to 12 gb for the c: drive. After when you look in disk manager Disk 0 shows 12gb used for the c drive and xx left over as un-used space. Most people use this space to create a d: drive but Diskpart can reclaim (extend) this space to the c drive and make the max available.

 

When you add disks to the raid stripe you are adding extra space but you can't easily extend the virtual disk. As disscussed, the safest and easiest way is to back it all up, destroy and re-create the virtual disk to use alll the space then restore.

 

Another option is to create another virtual disk in the raid bios or omsa. Then convert both to dynamic and concatenate the new disk onto the old, basically add it on to the end. You will have two physical volumes but the os will see only one. Most techs will tell you to stear clear of dynamic disks because it is an overlay to the disk structure and can create it's own problems but it is an option. Convert to dynamic is ok, revert to basic disk and you have data loss.

 

Another option, create the other virtual disk, format it as (the next avail letter) XX. Then use Distributed file system under 2003 to create a continuous file space.

 

It will all come down to bandwidth, now many users, what type of apps, i/o etc. The fastest (most efficient) would be, the destroy, re-create etc. Dynamic next then dfs (debateable) Again dependant on cpu, memory and raid card.