Shrink raid5 on 3ware controller

[LaZBoY]

Does anyone know if it is possible to shrink a raid5?

what i mean is: yesterday I had a raid5 with 4x500gb (with 1,3 tb of data) now I have expanded the raid to 6x500 gb (still 1,3 tb data).. But since over 2 tb is a problem with MBR-partitions (see: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/244183-14-noob-question-raid-win2003-raid) I would like to reverse back to 4 disks again without formatting.

Can this be done?

btw: the controller is a 3ware 9550

 

[SomeJoe7777]

In general, no RAID controllers allow you to shrink the RAID volume. Since they don't know anything about the file system, they assume that shrinking it would cause you to lose data.

You will have to back up the data somewhere, delete and redefine the RAID volume, and then copy all the data back.

Alternatively, you can use an operating system that supports GPT disks (XP x64, Vista, Windows Server 2003 SP1), and convert the MBR disk to a GPT disk.