SmartArray 532 2nd logical drive not in Disk Management

[sf383]

ML350 w/ Smart Array 532, Windows SBS2003.

Installed 2x new 146gb drives in open slots, existing was 3x 72gb and 1x hotspare with one logical drive.

Extended the array successfully onto the new drives.

Created a 2nd logical drive. However it does not appear in Windows Disk Management, even after a restart.

ACU states 'background parity queued/initializing". From other posts it says you need to write to the new partition to get this to start.

Which can't be done because the new partition doesn't show up in Disk Management!

Goal is a new partition on these drives to hold Exchange only. System was originally installed by consultants and they left the Exchange IS on the the 15gb C: partition.

[TTr]

Here is what I think happened.
> Extended the array successfully onto the new drives.

This added the 2 new disks to the same array group with the 3 existing disks.

First you have to realize that the 2 new 146GB disks are used as 72GB disks so you lost half of the space of the existing disks.
Second with 3 existing disks you have raid5 array and adding 2 more disks to the array, it will cause a re-striping of the entire existing array LUN from 3 disks/stripes to 5 disks/stripes.

So I think the array right now is STILL in the expanding state (3 disks to 5 disks), the new LUN is not created yet.

Depending on how active the server/array is the expand process can take hours and into days. You can change the "expand priority" and set it to high, it will speed up the expansion process.

[TTr]

> First you have to realize that the 2 new 146GB disks are used as 72GB disks so you lost half of the space of the existing disks

The above should read:
First you have to realize that the 2 new 146GB disks are used as 72GB disks so you lost half of the space of the *newly added* disks.

[sf383]

The lost of space is fine - would have bought 72gb disks but they are unavailable.