Proliant DL360 problem

[Eric Hutchinson_2]

When we first purchased our DL 360 to act as our webserver the first observation made with another Network Administrator was the two small 18.2 gig drives that were setup as a mirror at the bios level. Well now as we predicted we are running out of space. I need a solution to increase the drive space without breaking the logical drive. Our web pages have so many links that it would be a nightmare to try to offload some of the space to another logical drive. As I have said before the mirror is created at the bios level. I have two 72.8 gb drives waiting to go but I do not know how to do this. Does anybody have a solution?

[kcpant]

Hi Eric,

I haven't worked for such problem on DL360, so have no idea that the following method will work for you or not.And since it's production server, i'll not suggest you follow these instruction on this server, instead you can simulate the same on a separate DL 360 if you have one.

1. remove one 18.2 GB disk ( power off the server to do this)
2. add one new 73 Gb hdd.
3. rebuild the mirror.
4. After rebuild completed,remove the other 18 gb hdd, and put the new 72 GB there.
5. rebuid again.
6. now, you will have logical drive of 18 GB+ rest of the space as free.you can you any partition managment utility to extend your current partition, or you can make a new one.

hope it will work.

[Tv_3]

I can confirm this works !

DO NOT FORGET TO UPDATE the firmware of the BIOS, RAID and DISKS !

Someone@HP told me not to plug out the disks when the system is running. Best Practice to successfully doing this is rebooting the system between the "disks pull-outs".

Please make also sure you have a disaster recovery plan (in other words a backup)

Sincerly

[John Marinov]

For *hot plug drives* ONLY the best thing to do is to make the change while the system is up and running. The reason is that if your new disk has an array on it, how does the array controller tell which is the real array.

Boot the system. Pull one drive, insert new drive and *make sure* the drive activity light shows the array as rebuilding. May take 10 sec or so.

Check Insight Manager to see when the array rebuild is complete, then do it to the remaining drive.

[Eric Hutchinson_2]

Well I made it work and here are the steps. Mind you I did this on a test box with a brand new install of w2k. First before I pulled ny drives I made sure SP4 was installed and the firmware for the Smart Array controller was up to date. I also installed the Diskpart utility from the 2000 resource kit.

1.) I powered down the server and pulled out a 9.1 gig scsi drive and replaced it with a 72 gig drive. I powered up the server and let it rebuild. Once I was certain it was stable and rebuilt to the 72 gig drive I repeated the procedeure with the other 72 gig drive. Both times I powered down the server when replacing the drives. At the end of this I had two 72 gig drives running in a mirror with only a logical drive of 9 gig used.
2.) Next I downloaded and installed the latest Proliant support pack for Windows 2000 .
3.) I had to reboot to enable some of the features of the Proliant support pack.
4.) I ran the web based ACU and clicked on Extend Partition. There was a figure on the screen saying the amount of space I could use . I used all but 1 meg of the space. This process took about 2 hours to rebuild the logical partition.
5.) I then ran the diskpart utility, got the volume number, selected the volume, and typed in extend.

Now when all was said and done I had extended the partition to 72 gig roughly and everything seems to be fine. It reports through my computer and Disk manager as a healthy NTFS volume. Here is my problem. Microsoft says I should not be able to do this. Check out KB325590 from MS. I "have"
a pagefile.sys and this "is" a system volume. How come it worked? I would really appreciate some feedback before I try this on a live box.

Thanks