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pbrane

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Unlisted Disk Space from Raid

Hi,
We have an HP; ProLiant ML350 G5 running Server 2008 Ent.
There are 6 x 136Gb small form 10K scsi disks
HP Raid Array E200i util states 2 logical drives.
1st is 76gb RAID 5 and the 2nd is 607Gb Raid 5.

On the OS (Disk Management) its states:
C: 76Gb
E: 607Gb on the graphical panel below but 197Gb on the capacity above!
There is NO unpartitioned disk/space.

For starters this is impossible as both the above can RAID5 and achieve a 2nd logical drive of that size. My calculations would put this as 1 disk (C) and 5 disks (E).

Any body advise why this might be and how could possibly solve this please?
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rindi
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I'm not sure I quite understand the problem. You say you have a RAID 5 volume built from 6x136GB Disks, and this is partitioned to two ca 76GB + 607GB partitions for C and E drives. That's just about what I'd expect to get with 6x136GB drives. I'm also not sure what you mean with "197Gb on the capacity above!"?
6x136 in RAID 5 would indeed leave you with 5x136 = 680 (give or take some overhead) space ; so why that 197 is being presented as being available is weird, but sure isnt physicly there as available.

try updating your raid controller firmware and/or controller drivers.
Can you get us a screenshot of Disk Management?
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pbrane

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I appear to have a mistake on the RAID config. This does appear to be correct but we still don't understand why we only have 197Gb available in windows although Disk Management is displaying correctly the available 607Gb.

Thanks for all your input.
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I would suggest creating a full backup copy of that E drive and remove it from your raid config, rebooting and recreate again in Windows. Only way you can do this if that E drive is not being used by any process.
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Thank you for the info.
We uncertain what work has been performed on this server as it is a recent contract we've acquired.

I did consider shrinking the volume (we have a licensed copy of Paragon's partition manager) but to be honest, I'm terrified of the risk of data loss.

There is the Exchange DBs (easily moved if I had space on C), some Program Files apps and much more.

Looks like a lot of discussions and planning ahead of me with the customer.

I will hold this open for a short in-case anyone else as anything to add.

Many Thanks.
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p.s. My posts are Typo City, sorry about that.
I've never yet had an issue shrinking and resizing using either the builtin Windows Diskmanagement (except that there was a size mismatch as in your case, but that was easily corrected using the methods I explained above), nor with paragon. There was never any data loss. But of course it is needless to say that a good backup is vital, not only when you change things. Apart from that it should be a fast process as you don't really have to move any data in the process.
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Guys,
Thank you for your answers. We are definitely ensuring we have a backup to mitigate any risk and then we'll attempt Paragon first.
I'll keep this question open for the time being to allow me to provide a complete answer.

Many Thanks.
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Guys, we couldnt risk the changes and data loss, downtime etc, so we bought new storage disks and are in the process of moving the data. I will hopefully share the points equally.