Adding two drives to a RAID5 SCSI Array.

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You've been able to expand a RAID array on a Proliant Smart Array controller on the fly for years so there isn't any "new" solution. You do however have to have a battery backed write cache enabler. Open the ACU, select the blue ? in the top right hand and under Arrays how to... and Logical drives how to... it tells how to expand the array and then extend the logical drive.

It is of course best to backup first just in case but it should be able to continue the expansion/extension even if there's a power-cut in the middle of the opperation since the battery backed RAM keeps track of what's happening.

You can only extend the last logical drive so D: can be done but C: probably not.

ASKER

Things just got a little more complicated....After taking a look at the server myself and having everything explained to me in full detail, it appears these two drives that were going to be added, are already in and have data on them (F:\). I'm looking at the array config utility and this is what it looks like:

Smary Array 6i Controller in Embedded Slot
----Parallel SCSI Array A with Spare
--------Logical Drive 1 (280015 MB, RAID 5) <---holding C:\ and D:\ (3 GB Free)
--------Logical Drive 2 (280023 MB, RAID 5) <---holding F:\ (Using compression and 16 GB free)

Apparently logical drive 2 is sharing the same hot spare...as it was explained to me.

And looking in Computer Management>Disk Managment, it shows F:\ as being a dynamic disk...

YIKES!!! I wasn't the one who set this up so I'm still trying to wrap my head around all of this...

Now that all the cards are on the table...Is it possible to take F:\ and extend it to D:\??? If not, should I just backup F:\ to tape, use the array config utility to wipe those two drives out, then extend the space to D:\?

What a mess...

You say there's data on F - is it being used?

The dynamic disk is seperate from the array - you can expand the dynamic disk within windows given that you have free space.

If you're wanting to take from F - and it's still valid data - then you'll have to backup, wipe the logical parition (#2) and then expand the first with it.

And you can remove the hot spare from management for both logical disks - it doesn't 'have' to be available for most - but it's not going to hurt anything either...

ASKER

yeah, F is almost full...250 some odd GB and we need the data off of it. I'd like to remove F completely and just have a C and D. D would have ~560GB when all said and done...

I'm in agreement with backing up F to tape, and restoring once I expand D. I don't see any other method to doing this.

I'm glad I have some experts in the Top 15 helping me out with this one :) I think you understand my pain in the logic of how this was implemented in the first place...

That sounds like the easiest route at this point...good luck!

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ASKER

Thank you both for your help. I'm going to back everything up Friday and start on it early next week. Are there any Free 3rd party solutions that will extend D in Windows once that unallocated space is available? Otherwise, would BootitNG be best for a 2003 server?

ASKER

andyalder,

I've just been reading up on diskpart on the microsoft site...here's what is says about it..."Any non-boot partition can be expanded into available disk space with Diskpart.exe".

So technically since C is my boot partition and D is just basic file storage, I can use this?

Since C & D both sit on your primary logical disk, you may not be able to - I can't say for certain, because I've not had the same disk layout that you have. Try right-clicking disk 0 in disk manager and see if you can convert it to dynamic (don't actually 'do' it until you've got a good backup though). If that option's grayed out - then you'll have to use a 3rd party utility...

On second thoughts you probably can use diskpart to extend it, must have been a limitation with one of the earlier versions I used. Probably the earlier diskpar (no T) utility that was in the NT4 resource kit.

ASKER

After right-clicking on Disk 0 the option to convert to dynamic disk is available. Do I really have to convert to dynamic disk in order to extend the D:\ partition? I haven't played with dynamic disks much so excuse my lack of knowledge on it. Basically I just know you can convert from basic to dynamic without losing data, but not the other way.

Here's my diagram of Disk Management:

Disk 0- Basic- 273 GB Online [8 MB- healthy (EISA config)] [C: 16 GB NTFS Healthy (system)] [Data (D:) 256 GB NTFS Healthy]

Disk 1- Dynamic- 273 GB Online [Photos (F:) 273 GB NTFS Healthy]

After I use Array config utility it should look like this right???:

Disk 0- Basic- 273 GB Online [8 MB- healthy (EISA config)] [C: 16 GB NTFS Healthy (system)] [Data (D:) 256 GB NTFS Healthy] [273 GB Unallocated Space]

Sorry to go into so much detail, but I just want to make sure you get all the info...

I really wouldn't advise converting to dynamic even though there's a 3rd party utility that claims to be able to convert back to basic without data loss. diskpart works with basic disks and even if it won't do it the trial of bootit NG works fine, try it out on your workstation.

After extending through the ACU windows Disk Manager should indeed look like the above.