replacing raid disks 1 by 1 and let raid rebuild each time to upgrade capacity,

[pete panaroni]

Win2k server runs on a HP LC2000 server with 6 disks striped making one raid volume seperated into about 5 partitions.

I basically want to backup everything in the volume
Pull the low capasity drives out
Put the big ones in
restore the system as it was with the extra space available for partitioning


Someone said this and I want to know if it will work...

I'm not familiar with the old HP range, but the old Compaq range would allow you to pull the drives one by one, and replace them with a higher capacity version. eg, pull the 4.3Gb drive, and plug in a 9.1 or 18.2GB drive. wait for the rebuild to complete, then repeat with the next drive.
Eventually, when all disks in the logical set were replaced, you'd be presented with the unused space which you could then create a logical drive one, and then partition in window and format as you saw fit. I'd be surprised if the HP kit didn't operate in a similar way, but check first - do you have a support agreement with HP? Give them a call to check first.


my question is, will that work?
thanks.
Pete

[El.Magnifico]

As far as I know this will not work.

If you have 6 4.3 disks and you replace one by a 9.1 disk RAID-Controller will only use 4.3GB of the new disk.

I don't believe that the controller will reconfigure the drives if it detects that all 6 drives were replaced.

Only the newest RAID-Controllers may have such features like virtual RAID.

But if you try please post the results.

Michael

[Sean T. Craig]

Hi Pete,

As someone who has done this myself, I can assure you that this is the way it works. If you have 6x4.1GB drives in a RAID-5 and you replace one of them with an 18.2GB drive, the array will only use 4.1GB of that drive. The difference is when you have replaced all 6 drives, the logical drive will still be the same size (20GB) but there will be a big chunk of space (64GB) that is not part of a logical drive. If you go into M at startup, it will recognize this space and configure a second logical drive which Windows will detect as unallocated space. Disk Management will then allow you to partition/format the space as you like.

Give it a try and let us know how well it worked.

Sean T. Craig Sr. C.E.T., M.C.P.