raid 5

[John Straq]

Can someone help me?
HP DL 380 G4 raid 5 3 Hard disks
is one logical drive.
after adding one drive to array it is showing unused space the size off that added drive.
Why is it unused space and why is it not added to the logical drive.
when I want to use it do I have to make a new logical drive now?
I prefer to see the original logical drive becomes bigger wthout losing the data.

[Alexander Chuzhoy]

Assuming you run the latest RedHat release.
first you have to run pvcreate , where the represents the newly installed hard drive.
Then you need to extend the volume group.
vgextend VolumeGroupName , again where the represents the newly installed hard drive.
Then you could extend the logical volume (lvextend) and finally grow the file system with resize2fs.

[Uwe Zessin]

The logical disk's size is not automatically increased, because:

- not all operating systems deal well with an increased logical disk size

- and some people indeed may want to create an additional logical disk instead of growing the/an existing one

[John Straq]

Is this also working for Suse enterprise Server 9 using
ReiserFS and two partitions on it
I want to extend one off them with the new drive space.
There is already data on this server.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Don't forget to provide Red Hat a non-raid 5 area from which to boot. It won't boot from a raid 5 array.

From experience, you will need to create a new logical drive. Expansion would require a full system backup and restore.

SEP

[Ciro Iriarte]

What's the output of:

hpacucli ctrl slot=0 show status
hpacucli ctrl slot=0 ld all show status
hpacucli ctrl slot=0 pd all show status

[Uwe Zessin]

> It won't boot from a raid 5 array.

I am very sure John is working with a hardware RAID-5 which is presented as a single disk to the OS.

[Robert Walker_8]

Gday,

If you have added a drive to an existing array that wont be available (shown up as unused space) until you expand the array. This doesnt generally cause problems but a backup is advised - the expansion process is transparent to the OS except some performance degradation. See smartarray controller settings about expansion (as low, medium, high).

After the expansion, you can then create a new lun. If you use LVM on the server then you can create the new lun and add to the existing pv pool and then expand lv lun as required.

Robert.

[John Straq]

Oke guys this is the situation.
I booted in the past and still do from this array.
Add a drive and extended the array succesfully.
In the OS suse enterprise server 9 via Yast I can see that there is this space more or less the size off the new added drive that I should be able to add to the partition /usr.
In Yast there is a button with 'adjust size' on it so I highlite the \usr partition and add the free space and press the button 'adjust size'.
the result is ...unable to resize \usr
any ideas?

[Ciro Iriarte]

Are you using LVM?, the easiest way would be to create a new partition, define it as a PV and add it to the VG.

If you're not using LVM, probably can't resize partitions (depends on the actual layout) and if your layout helps, it must be done offline.