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Re: Upgrading RAID 1 Drives

 
Philip Kluss
New Member

Upgrading RAID 1 Drives

I'll start by giving you a thorough background on my setup.

The server involved is an HP Proliant DL320 G3. It originally had two 80GB HDs mirrored into a RAID1 with a hardware RAID controller. The RAID controller is specifically the Adaptec Embedded SATA HostRAID with the aarich.sys (ver. 6.0.0.75) driver.

Before I arrived, there was attempt to upgrade the RAID drives from the 80GB mirror to a 250GB mirror. The drives were ghosted to the 250GB drives, the mirror re-established (I'm not sure on the exact process that was followed) and presto!, there were two 250GB drives mirrored and seen as 80GB drives by Windows Server 2003.

The disk management utility in Windows is none the wiser, but the HP Storage Manager utility is able to see these drives' capabilities (250GB). Of course, it won't let me change them in the utility, so really it's just informational (torture). They are basic disks (not dynamic).

My question to you all is how can I (step-by-step) get these drives to be recognized as 250GB mirrors without losing any data? If you need more info from me, please let me know.

Thanks.

ptk
5 REPLIES 5
Philip Kluss
New Member

Re: Upgrading RAID 1 Drives

OK, here's what I'm thinking and you can at least shoot my idea down if it's stupid.

As far as I can tell the RAID controller we have is about as cheap as it gets. It offers little functionality beyond the basics. That said, these are the steps I'm envisioning taking...

1) Break RAID 1 mirror. (even though I've seen no way to do this in the HP Storage Manager Utility, I'm hoping that the DOS-based one at bootup gives me this functionality. this is a critical server, so i can't just boot it down any time I want.)
2) Boot to Symantec Ghost boot disk and do a disk-to-disk clone of the drive, taking careful measures to check the "Resize drive to fill unallocated space".
3) Boot back into RAID utility in DOS and recreate the mirror using the newly sized drive as the source.
4) Open bottle of champagne (far from computer).

Does this sound right?

Thanks in advance.

ptk
Mike Bollman_1
Respected Contributor

Re: Upgrading RAID 1 Drives

Phillip how are the drives partitioned? And which partition do you wish to extend?
Philip Kluss
New Member

Re: Upgrading RAID 1 Drives

There is just one large C: partition on Basic disk.
Mike Bollman_1
Respected Contributor

Re: Upgrading RAID 1 Drives

Yeah so you basically have it down then.

Windows will not allow you to extend the system partition with native tools. You either have to do a backup, rebuild, restore operation or use a 3rd party tool. I have used ghost in the past to do this as well. If it is windows 2000 you can use volume manager from symantec to extend the volume also.

*note - no matter what route you go be sure to get a good full backup of the system.

P.s. please be kind and assign points to everyone providing assistance.
Philip Kluss
New Member

Re: Upgrading RAID 1 Drives

How do I get Ghost to recognize my drives? It seems I'd need a RAID driver before it boots into Windows. Maybe I'm overlooking something...