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Move from 1 disk to 4 disk raid 5 T-300 SBS 2008
Need to modify 1 disk no-raid to 4 disk raid 5 without backup and restore. What process and procedure would you use? Background, I volunteered to help an organization reconfigure their SBS 2008 server. Last year they received (for free) a Dell T-300 running SBS 2008 with 10 licenses. The organization has nine people. Now for the downside. The machine has 1-250GB hard drive and 4 GB of RAM. The hard drive is split into a 75GB c-drive and the rest is a D-drive for data. The c-drive is completely full (only 100 MB of free space) and the d-drive has only 5 GB of space. They are running AD, File, print and SQL. No Exchange or SharePoint. Originally they had backup to the cloud, but because the software was running on the c drive they removed it. They are now using Windows Backup to a USB drive. They have a few hundred to spend to upgrade it. I will probably upgrade the RAM from 4 GB to 8GB and purchase 3-250GB hard drives to create a raid 5 machine and expand the space. The Dell T-300 machine comes with a perc raid controller so hardware raid is possible. I have also found the same Seagate disks as what is in the machine now. What I normally would do is to back up the hard drive, format, and create raid 5 scenario from scratch, then reinstall but because of some circumstance beyond my control I have very limited time. My plan b is to create a 3 disk software raid 5 for the d-drive and use a partition manger to resize the c-dive. Is there a sane way to rollout the raid 5 from the single disk?
theflash1932
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9 Legend
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March 11th, 2014 23:00
You mentioned you had a "PERC" ... the "PERC" in a T300 (PERC 6/i) does not support non-RAID, so if you are using a PERC 6, your single disk would have to be a single-disk RAID 0, meaning you CAN add disks to the system and reconfigure your 1-disk RAID 0 to a 4-disk RAID 5 on the fly. You will need the OpenManage Server Administrator (OMSA) software installed in order to do this. OMSA MUST be installed on the C: drive, which may complicate your scenario. If you do not already have OMSA installed, you can use OMSA Live to initiate the reconfigure. You could also move the page file to D: to free up enough space to install OMSA (IF you have not already moved it for space reasons).
pcmeiners
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March 12th, 2014 06:00
"The c-drive is completely full (only 100 MB of free space"
Better make some space fast, letting you system drive run out of space is a great way to corrupt your OS.
CCleaner works on servers, does a nice cleanup.
ewj1
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March 13th, 2014 20:00