Need more info to adding drive to array

[Craig_79]

Is it as easy as installing the ACU utility, adding the drive, and expanding the array? Running RAID 5, Windows SBS 2003 Premium. Help much appreciated.


Have 1 Logical drive with 2 Primary partitions, 1 contains OS, other contains Apps. Also have a extended Partition broken into 3 containing data, exchange data & swapfile respectively. Want to add drive and extend space proportionally to all partitions. I can move everything on the extended Partition if I need to. OS and Data free space are getting small.

[Terry Hutchings]

Doing what you described will give you additional drive space, but won't do anything about your partitions. You'll need some other tool to do this with the partitions.

[Steven Clementi]

Craig:

You will need a thrid party utility, something similar to Partition Magic, that works with WIndows Server 2003 in order to modify your partitions.


Steven

[Craig_79]

I thought the utility would ask "how" to add the drive. No? I know HP is not IBM, but IBM servers can do this. I it would be real nice if HP added this function to the uitility. I have RAID 5 with 3 drives & want to go to Raid 5 with 4 drives. What procedure would you recommend?

[Craig_79]

I found this in another post.
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00294139/c002941
39.pdf

I'm not clear if what I want to do is "Expanding Array" or "Extending logical Drive" Can someone explain the difference to me? Thanks

[Terry Hutchings]

You'll be doing both, but there is no utility built into the array config utility to do anything about adding space to one partition or all of them equally for that matter. Once you expand the array, then extend the logical drive, you'll see free space at the end of the existing drive.

[Steven Clementi]

Alternatively, after adding the 4th drive, you can create a separate new logical drive and migrate some of your data off of the original logical drive.

If done properly, you may be able to expand most of your space used for DATA, but will still need a 3rd party utility to extend the OS/system partition.


ACU will only allow you to add the drive to make it a bigger array and either extend the "free space" on an existing drive OR create a new logical drive. ServeRAID Manager should do the same, or at least it did last time I used it. After the fact, you stil need to manipulate the partitions within Windows with a 3rd party utility (IBM OR HP).


Steven

[Steven Clementi]

Expanding Array = You add more disks to the Array so that you have more available unused space to allocate to logical drives.

Extend Logical Drive = You give more of the unused space to a particular logical drive so that your OS can utilize it.


The third step is Partition manipulation through 3rd party software.

You will at least perfom step 1, Array Expansion. Step 2 is questionable at this point since you have other options to manipulate your existing configuration.


If you tell use the sizes of your partitions and drives, we may be able to assist in coming up with an easier/better way to extend your availavle space for data.


Steven

[Craig_79]

Thanks guys, understand now. I can increase the data partition without much problem. The OS partition I plan to mount it to an empty folder on my apps partition. Are mounted folders/drives a good idea. Any issues in this, say during a full restore (if ever need to)? Thanks again.