Extending drive space

[Karen Lavis]

I am using a smart array 3200, and I just added 2 new drives. I extended the logical array using ACU-XE, and the size increased. The actual disk size in Windows NT did not increase, it remained the same. How do I convince the OS there is new space?

[Steven Clementi]

Karen:

For windows NT, i think you need to use a 3rd party utility lile Partition Magic to extend a partition. In Windows 2000 and 2003, there is a Microsoft Utility called diskpart which can be used to extend data partitions. Not sure if it works with NT though. Probably not.

Asidefrom all this, you will not see the disk size increase automatically. You should see "Free Space" at the end of the disk swhich you can use to make another partition or extend into with the 3rd party utility.


Steven

[e4services]

That is right, Karen. It is a common misconception, connecting the idea of the RAID created drive and you "drive" in the OS, in your case Windows NT. The unaware connect the word "drive" to the disk DRIVE they have in there hand.
The Array controller creates the appearence of a single 'drive' or "Logical Drive" from a group of hard disks, and presents it to the Server System BIOS to look like a single disk drive.
The OS, of course, has to partition and format new disk drives. In this case, the size of the 'drive' has increase, but the OS can not simply expand the size of the partition that it had formatted before. It wants you to create a new partition with the new space and format it. This is way there are utilities out there like VolumeMagic (PartitionMagic) to manipulate the partition information to expand partitions.