DL360 G5, and new RAID 5 question.

[JoshIT]

hi, I have a DL360 G5 which has two hard disks. No RAID was done during the install. So now, the OS and applications are set up on the first disk and the second disk though partitioned as E in windows 2003 is not used and is just sitting there. With this setup, is there anyway I can add one more disk and setup RAID 5 without losing any data? if so, how? Just looking for some fault tolerance here without harming the data.

Another question I have is, assuming I do have RAID 5 on this machine, is there anyway I can later extend the C partition by adding more disks? Just wondering what folks do to deal with the problem of the ever reducing disk space on the server's C drive.

Incidentally, it has smart array P400i.

Thanks a lot for your suggestions.

[Mark Matthews]

If you were to create a new array on the array controller now, all your existing data would be lost.

The server may have auto set itself up to Raid 1 (mirrored) when it saw that it had two disks on first bootup.

In which case you could try migrating the Raid 1 to Raid 5 in ACU.

This wont, however get round your "C: drive running out of space" problem.

Windows always sets its first drive (ie C:) up as a Basic Disk in Disk Management.
General rule is you cannot expand the system drive or a drive with a pagefile on it. So your always stuck with what you create it as in the first place...

Sounds like you'll need to backup all your data, add a third disk, create a RAID5 array, create a logical disk big enough for C: and future expansion and take it from there...

Then, dont install any apps on C: unless you really have to.
Install to E: (or whatever) instead.

Mark...