Need to resize a RAID 5 config. Anyone successful with this?

Well, there's a couple points to be made here.

First, if you searched the Internet for potential problems with Partition Magic or Acronis Disk Director, all you will turn up are people who had problems with the software (for whatever reason). Hardly anyone posts that the software worked perfectly for them, so you get an unclear picture as to the software's reliability.

I personally use Partition Magic 8 all the time and have never had a problem with it that trashed data. It has, on some occasions, given me error messages about a file system that couldn't be fixed, but the result of that has always been that it just aborts the operation before it starts.

So, to address your problem, we need to know a few things.

What's the current drive configuration of this server? i.e. What physical drives are in the machine, what disk controller are they set up on, what RAID logical volumes are set up, and what partitions are set up on them? This is going to determine whether the operation you want to do is even possible or not.

Thank you both. I will pose the question to Dell and await their answer.

One server has a PERC2/SC and the other has a PERC2/DC.

Specs on Servers
Server #1
PowerEdge 4300
Server 2003 Enterprise Edition
PERC2/SC
18Gb Drives - Basic
C:\Drive (750Mb)
E:\Drive (30Gb)
RAID 5 Config

Server #2
PowerEdge 2400
Server 2003 Enterprise Edition
PERC2/DC
18Gb Drives - Basic
C:\Drive (1.4Gb)
E:\Drive (30Gb)
RAID 5 Config
18Gb Drives

I am planning on moving some of the space on the E:\ drives over to C:\ drive.

OK, I assume that each machine is using 18GB drives, and each machine has 3 of them to do the RAID 5.

It appears that each machine has one logical container set up on the RAID-5, and that logical container is approximately 32GB. (4GB missing? Should be 36GB? Is there maybe a hidden Dell restore partition using the additional 4GB? I will assume so.)

I also take it you want to steal space from the E: partition on each machine to increase the size of the C: partition. I also assume that all partitions are NTFS.

If all of my assumptions are correct, and if this is what you want to do, then it is possible.

Acronis Disk Director will directly allow you to resize the partitions. Obviously, you'll back up all data first. Then you'll resize E: downwards by maybe 4GB, and then resize C: upwards by 4GB. That'll give you a 4.75GB C: on server 1 and 5.4GB C: on server 2. In no case should you mess with the 3rd partition you'll probably see on the drives, that's the Dell System Restore partition.

Partition Magic 8 by default will not allow you to do anything to the partitions on a server operating system. Partition Magic makes this decision by looking at the operating system installed on the first hard disk enumerated by the system BIOS. Since, in this case, there is only one hard disk enumerated (the RAID 5 logical container) which contains Windows Server 2003, Partition Magic will refuse to run.

However, if you can connect another hard disk to the server that has a desktop operating system installed on it, and tell the server temporarily in the BIOS that that's the boot drive, you can then boot the Partition Magic 8 CD, it will see the desktop operating system as the C: drive, and will allow you to do anything you want. I have also been able to do this by booting Partition Magic from a USB key using syslinux. The USB key is seen as the C: drive. Don't worry about the desktop operating system, you're never going to attempt to boot the server from that drive, it just has to be there to convince Partition Magic that it's running on a workstation, not a server.

Now, all you're doing here is trading space on E: for space on C:. You're not actually changing the size of the RAID-5 logical volume/container. The PERC2 series of RAID controllers don't support online capacity expansion, so changing all drives one at a time to a larger physical drive won't work. If you need more space, you will have to use Acronis TrueImage or Norton Ghost to image all the partitions to a network drive, replace all 3 drives, create a new RAID-5 logical volume/container, and then copy all the partition images back and resize.

I've used Partition Magic to resize a RAID 5 array controlled by Intel's Matrix Storage Manager connected to an Intel ICH7R. It blew the array parity, but it rebuilt itself without losing any data.

I have almost the exact problem. Dell PowerEdge 1800 dual proc , RAID 5, c drive needs to be expanded... D, contracted. T1tech... did you ever get an answer from Dell on how to do this.

whatever you do make sure you image all partitions to a backup drive before doing anything.

You should not do this on a production server IMO.

However, the Windows' "expand" feature in Device Manager might be the safest choice of all. It needs to have free space after the C: partition so it can expand; so backup and delete anything after C: so C: is able to expand.