Extending RAID 5 Array

[Jeff Poling]

I have a Proliant DL380 G2 running Windows 2000 Server SP3. It has a Smart Array 431 card and the disks are configured as one RAID5 array. I recently added a new physical disk to the server. I would like to add the capacity on the new disk to one of the logical drives in the array. When I try to do that, I get a message about extending logical drives not supported in Windows 2000 - Data loss may occur.

Is it possible to add a physical drive to an array and extend a logical drive on a server running W2K?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Jeff

[Frank Kaufman]

To dextend the array, you have to use the ACU. It does not care what the O/S is.

[Jeff Poling]

I used the Array configuration utility and it gave me an error when I tried to extend an existing logical drive. The error said that extending logical drives is not supported under Windows 2000. My question is whether or not the error message is correct: Is extending a logical drive using the ACU NOT supported in W2K?

Thanks,

Jeff

[Seth Parker]

I've not tried this with a 431, but I installed an extra disk and added it to one of my arrays, then extended the W2K partition. I believe you have to use a more recent version of the ACU than you have installed. The one I used warned about this action not being supported under Win2K before SP3 (I think it was SP3). Anyway, once you use ACU to add the disk to the array, use the MS utility Diskpart.exe to extend the partition.

Here's a link on Diskpart:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;325590

It was relatively painless. Adding the disk to the array took a while, but the Diskpart command took effect immediately.

Good luck!
Seth