I find myself in a similar circumstance - my original system as built-out by Dell (a 1400SC with Perc3/C) used a 4GB partition for W2K Server - and we've since upgraded to W2003 Standard Edition. We were using RAID1 and had hoped to move to RAID5 as we add 2 additional 68GB drives. (our D: drive consumes the balance of the disk) but are now questioning this approach.
We discarded the idea of adding the two new drives into a new RAID5 configuration and then converting the entire virtual drive to a dynamic disk to work with the new dynamic disk partition functionality - to extend partition sizes - as Microsoft is clear that we can't have two bootable partitions on the same physical disk (the Dell Diagnostic Partition is also present and bootable.). [We were also concerned about the restriction that the boot drive cannot be part of a spanned volume - but we think this restriction only applies to software-RAID configurations, and would not be an issue. We think this approach could still work if we were willing to blow away the Dell utility partition, we surmised.]
We are therefore looking at keeping the drive as a basic drive and using the microsoft utility diskpart to extend the C: partition, after first moving off our D: extended partition to the new 68GB drives which will be set up as another RAID 1 Array Group.
If this fails to work - then we will reinstall W2003 and restore using our backup tapes, resizing the C: drive as part of the recovery procedure.
I'll give you some more feedback on how it goes - we intend to do this upgrade over the weekend, but if you've found a better approach - please share it! I expect there are quite a few of us in the same situation!
Unfortunately, the upgrade turned into a nightmare - mainly a combination of problems, but the most significant one was that our Backup/Restore solution (Veritas BE 9.1) failed to restore the system sucessfully. Apparently the BE solution did not anticipate restoring from disk backups (.bkf) and we needed to rebuild the system first and then restore by hand. This was all complicated by the fact that our system in question was the PDC and originally W2K Server (later upgraded to W2003) and the restore operations require the same system location (WINNT for W2K, WINDOWS for W2003.) In the midst of all of this our tape drive failed while attempting to do restores!
What I take away from all of this is as follows:
(1) Adding the new disks and configuring a new array was trivial.
(2) Validate your restore operation prior to eliminating the working layout. In our case I believe we could have cloned the existing system to the new array and then moved between the newly added arrat and the existing array as we encountered the various problems.
kevotron
16 Posts
0
April 5th, 2005 16:00
sqv
3 Posts
0
April 7th, 2005 16:00
kevotron
16 Posts
0
April 13th, 2005 20:00
sqv,
You were able to rectify the situation with the drives? Howd that go for you?
sqv
3 Posts
0
April 17th, 2005 17:00
Unfortunately, the upgrade turned into a nightmare - mainly a combination of problems, but the most significant one was that our Backup/Restore solution (Veritas BE 9.1) failed to restore the system sucessfully. Apparently the BE solution did not anticipate restoring from disk backups (.bkf) and we needed to rebuild the system first and then restore by hand. This was all complicated by the fact that our system in question was the PDC and originally W2K Server (later upgraded to W2003) and the restore operations require the same system location (WINNT for W2K, WINDOWS for W2003.) In the midst of all of this our tape drive failed while attempting to do restores!
What I take away from all of this is as follows:
(1) Adding the new disks and configuring a new array was trivial.
(2) Validate your restore operation prior to eliminating the working layout. In our case I believe we could have cloned the existing system to the new array and then moved between the newly added arrat and the existing array as we encountered the various problems.