Extend RAID 5 volume

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.win2000.setup_deployment (More info?)

To extend a System partition you must remember the following:

1. Must be done from Safe Mode (Command Prompt) or boot to Safe Mode and
open a DOS window.
2. Must be done on Basic disks
3. New Free Space must be contiguous (unused space immediately following the
System partition).
4. Not recommended (or supported) for extending the System Partition, but
can be done if you are
running Win2000 SP1 or SP2. If you are running SP3 and SP4, it
intentionally cause errors when
you try to extend a system partition via Diskpart.exe since this is not a
supported approach.

Note: The supported way to extend a system/OS partition is to backup the
entire system partition,
repartition the system partition to include the additional new disk
space, format it, install the
OS again, then restore from backup.

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=300415
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=325590


Hope this helps

--
Kyle Lang [MSFT]
This posting is provided "As Is" with no warranties, and confers no rights.


"Adde" <anonymous@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:e23701c43c2a$760664c0$a101280a@phx.gbl...
> I'm running out of space on my W2k server, so I added an
> additional hard drive and now I would need to extend the
> existing volume to include the new hard drive!
>
> My current setup includes 4 discs setup as basic discs in
> a RAID 5 configuration.
>
> The options that have been suggested to me are use of
> third party software like ExtPart from Dell or
> VolumeManager from PowerQuest. However both methods seems
> to be a bit risky and I would like to hear from someone
> that has actually done this a few times and can recommend
> the most "secure" way of performing this operation. Any
> other working suggestions are welcome.
>
> Thanks,
>
> /Adde
>

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.win2000.setup_deployment (More info?)

Hi Adde,

Are you saying you splattered all your boot stuff, system stuff and data
all over the _same_ four disk RAID 5 array??

Adde wrote:
> I'm running out of space on my W2k server, so I added an
> additional hard drive and now I would need to extend the
> existing volume to include the new hard drive!
>
> My current setup includes 4 discs setup as basic discs in
> a RAID 5 configuration.
>
> The options that have been suggested to me are use of
> third party software like ExtPart from Dell or
> VolumeManager from PowerQuest. However both methods seems
> to be a bit risky and I would like to hear from someone
> that has actually done this a few times and can recommend
> the most "secure" way of performing this operation. Any
> other working suggestions are welcome.
>
> Thanks,
>
> /Adde
>


--
Gerry Hickman (London UK)

The most safe way is to have a backup inadvance and whenever there is someting wrong or unexpected data loss, you can get the data back from the backup.

So to safely extend your RAID 5 array, you should first backup data on Raid 5. Then delete the 3 drive array and re-create it as a 4 drive array. Restore the data to the new larger Raid 5 array and you're good to go. Here is a detaied solution: http://www.partition-tool.com/reso [...] -array.htm