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jhalscott

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Cannot create partition on 4TB span

I have a Dell PowerEdge 2950 that just had all six of the drive bays filled with 2TB drives. The Array configuration utility was run during the initial server installation using the Dell systems Management disk version 6.3.

The 6 drives were setup as a single RAID10 array. Once in Windows, the OS sees the array as two Disk0 one being 2TB and one being 4TB (actually a little less in both because of overhead). The OS was installed to a 100GB partition on the 2TB Disk0 and the rest configured as a single large partition. However, in Disk Management the 4TB Disk0 shows up, but no new partition can be created. All options are grayed out. OS is Windows Server 2008 x64 Standard. Dell OpenManage shows everything fine, but Windows seems to have a problem doing anything with the drive. I can't even select the option to convert to GPT disk.

How do I create a partition of partitions in this space? I'd hate to have wasted 8TB or raw drive capacity.
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TechnicallyMaybe
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It sounds like the disk hasn't been initialized yet? If the initialize disk wizard comes up, you can initialize it as GPT.
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jhalscott

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No, the disk is there and initialized. It shows as two Disk0. The smaller 2TB part has the OS on it and another partition now. Everything I am seeing points to the fact that it has to be GPT, but you can't do that before OS install and you cant do that after OS install. Is there some way to force it to convert?

I wanted to get the speed of the six disks in RAID10, but is this not possible? Do I have to reconfigure the RAID as two virtual disks, one with 2TB and the OS and one with 4TB that can then be converted to GPT? This is a terrible idea.
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The PowerEdge 2950 only has 6 drive bays, so it looks like having to create a 2 disk RAID1 and a 4 disk RAID10. OS to the RAID1 2TB drive and then converting the 4 disk RAID10 (or RAID5) with no partitions on it. I would think we would have gotten past this by 2010, but such is the way of things some times. Thanks.