Resize raid array

[Mark Bainter]

I've got a raid 1 array of 36G drives in a box that's hardly touching the storage. I'm looking to move those drives into our san where they can be used more efficiently.

Unfortunately, not only is the whole array in use by the compaq hardware, but it's got Windows 2000 on it with one big NTFS partition. This is a critical system, so I can't just back it up, rebuild the array and restore from tape.

However, I'm not aware of any way to resize a compaq array w/out destroying the logical drive and all data on it. At least not without a spare set of drives to replace it with.
Has anyone managed an online migration such as this? What tools did you use?

[Randy Weis]

Windows won't allow you to resize a partition or logical drive without destroying the data. This is a given with Microsoft. In any case, you need to put your data somewhere else long enought to pull those drives and put in smaller ones.

You could attach another array (is this FC or SCSI?, set up array, logical drive and partition. Copy your data over, delete old array/LD/partition, then reletter your new array. You can then remove the old array and re-deploy the drives. This would involve minimal downtime, a matter of minutes. How active is the data? If really active, you will lose some delta during the copy, unless you have replication software.

[Vincent Fleming]

There's a product out there called Partition Magic that can resize (larger or smaller) Microsoft partitions... I've used it, and it works nicely.

The question then is, can you shrink the Compaq array's LUN. I know you can grow LUNs, but I'm not sure you can shrink them without deleting them and re-creating.

[Mark Bainter]

My big question is in regards to the ability to shrink that logical volume in the hardware array. NTFS obv is a seperate issue that supposedly one can fix with partition magic (as noted above) however, the version I have does not work under w2k server. I haven't looked yet, but I am sure I'll find that they have a different (likely more expensive) version that works with w2k server.

Just not sure if I can resize the logical partition that's been created out of the drives w/out destroying it. Grow yes, shrink...it doesn't look like it.

[Saline]

You may try to resize the RAID for another partition for the data and leave the system on the raid. and then break the RAID and then rebuild one on the san.

http://www.partition-tool.com/resource/resize-raid.htm