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CreativemindsFlag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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How to expand the logical drive size?

With this server, it had 3 physical drives running RAID 5. I have added another 2 drives and using the raid manager they are now part of the logical drive but the logical drive size has not increased. All 5 drives identify  as part of the array and part of logical drive. In the logical drive, the capacity has not increased. What do I need to do to expand the logical drive to take advantage of the extra capacity of the added by the extra drives?
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r_panos

Normally after you expand the array with the newly added HDDs you must extend it and then use the diskpart utility from command line in order to identify the logical volume, select it and expand it to use the additional space.

Make sure you have a valid full backup of your volume before doing the operation.
If the operating system is installed on the RAID array, you can use a boot CD called GParted - I've used this many times myself and found it to be excellent and reliable - but as r panos says, back up first!

Gparted is free to download here: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

HTH
Hi, I don't see which OS are you using, but in Linux, I guess what you need is lvexpand and resize2fs...
If Linux is your operating system, I could write the whole procedure...
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ASKER

OS is Windows Server 2003. Backup I have. Am I right in thinking that if the array had been extended correctly then the unpartitioned space would show in disk mgmt snap in?
r panos, where/how do I extend the array?
The diskpart utility will not work on an OS partition, you need to use a 3rd party tool such as the GParted LiveCD.

Generally I'd expect the space to be visible in Disk Management - does your RAID controller report the new size or the old one?
Cool, got Gparted.

In serveRAID manager it shows the old for the logical disk but all 5 drives are part of the logical disk. The array of course shows the total of all 5 drives.
You told the hardware to expand the array, now you need to "tell" the "software part of the story" to expand the volume group, logical volume, and partiton(s)...
Never done it in wondiws, but type in those words in google, I'm sure you'll find some usefull stuff...
Avatar of Lee W, MVP
That's right, diskpart will not work on the boot/system drive.... but what drives are you trying to expand?
It is the boot/system drive.

Vojans, that doesn't really help me much. I have googled and hence why I am asking at ee. Still stuck so any help greatly appreciated
You're trying to expand the Boot/System drive?  Why?  How large are they now...?
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