upgrading to larger drives.

[ats1098]

I have a ML350 G4 with 641 raid and two 73Gb (raid 1). I'm upgrading to 300Gb (probably 3 in raid 5). I installed one 300Gb drive into in one of the 4 empty slots and created a new logical device. I booted from a server 2003 cd and went through create partition and formatting but when I got to repair or new install and selected new install it said no hard drive available.

The OS can't be running at the time the imaging software is running. I was hoping to run windows on this new drive just long enough so I could run Altiris Rdeploy image software for windows.

My existing OS on the 73Gb sees the 300GB as D drive.

Any detailed ideas would be great.

[Ken Henault]

Use Altiris boot disk creator to create a bootable CD ISO. Then mount and boot from that ISO using ILO Virtual Media.

[Robert Toth]

You'll need a bootable CD to do this properly. But there are several ways to do it, depending on what you have on hand as spare parts.

The fastest way is with a second drive cage and controller pair (another 641, or 6402/6404 in a pinch). You create the initial RAID-5 set with the 300GB drives on that second controller/cage, and then simply image it across from the old 73GB's to the new 300's. Obviously resize as needed while you're at it.

Once done, unplug the second controller and cage, remove the 73's and put in the 300's. The controller will pick up the change and boot normally, as nothing in the boot settings has changed in the O/S nor the BIOS sequence. This is a one-pass solution and the quickest.

If you don't have the spares handy, then you can do it using the same steps, with one addition: You'll create both arrays on the same controller (Array 1 & 2).

At the end of the copy, you'll have to remove the 73's while the server is powered down (after the copy). Boot it up and go into the Array Setup utility (the firmware one should be fine here, but you can use the one from the SmartStart CD too...). DELETE the FIRST RAID-1 Array configuration, leaving the second RAID-5 one. Then exit and power off. On restart, the controller will see only the remaining array, renumber it back to #1, and you should be good to go (not 100% certain about the Bootable flag here, you might need to check that).
This option is a bit longer, and a bit trickier as you do have to delete an array configuration to make it work, but the original drives will be fine as you had removed them while powered off so they will retain their array configuration if you need to go back.

Last option: Longer but a bit safer.
Image the 73's to a single drive array (Raid-0) 300GB. Make sure it's bootable at the end by powering off, removing the 73's and power on again. If so, next step:

Create a RAID-0 (stripe) array with the remaining drives. Run the image process again, back from the 300GB stand-alone. This will create your final partition sizes, and initial RAID array. Again, once done, power off, remove the single 300GB, and power on to see if it boots. If so, and everything is OK, plug that 300GB original drive back in, and THEN delete the standalone 300GB from the array config to kill the array configuration info that's saved on that drive so it becomes a "free" drive once again. It's probably best to do this from the BIOS FIRMWARE VERSION of the utility here so as to keep Windows from thinking the new drive is part of the O/S for any reason.

Now, once back in Windows, using the O/S Array utilities, you can plug in the remaining 300GB into the system and go thru the Array Configuration change process, changing it from RAID-0 to RAID-5. The size won't change, but now your redundancy will be installed. This will take about 12-18 hours to do, so best to just let it go overnight. But when you're done, you're done. Nothing else to do. And you will have been running already on the system at that point. You might also want to bump up the background rebuild priority to HIGH, and change the read/write priority to 25/75 or 0/100 during the rebuild to maximise the rebuild speeds. Turn it back down after you're done.

All of this of course starts up from a bootable CD that can see your drives / controllers. You cannot do this from within Windows directly (at least not very well...).

Hope this helps!

[ats1098]

Robert I don't have a second drive cage or controller. I have a spare DL380 but it has 6i controller. The other steps you mentioned may be over my head since I can't risk doing something stupid.

[ats1098]

Ken I looked at my Rdeploy but I don't see boot disk creator but I could use any other bootable CD, right? Could you explain about using ILO virtual media. I'm sure my ML does not have a ILO port. Also I don't have a SmartStart CD if that's needed. I don't recall getting one with my server.

Thanks

[Hense, Klaus]

What to you mean? Replacment the 2x 72GB Raid1 HDD against the 3x 300GB in Raid5?

Maybe you can go this way:
- Backup you Data (default when you change anything on drives and partitions)
- Upgrad the Firmware on Server and Controller, Update the PSP.
- delete the 300GB logical drive
- Then replace one 72GB Drive against a new 300GB drive and wait for sucess rebild.
- then replace the other 72GB Drive too drive.
- the add the free 300GB drive to the array
- after this migrate the raid1 logical drive to raid5
- after this expand the logical drive and maybe expand your ntfs partions with diskpart
- or create a new logical Drive with the unused diskspace
-