Disabling virtual sizing on a netraid

[James Gillies]

I've inherited an LH3000 with two RAID5s on its netraid controller. Both arrays are of 3 disks, and each is configured as a single logical drive.
The second array has virtual sizing enabled, and since we are not going to be adding any more disks, I'd like to know if I can turn off the virtual sizing without losing the data that's already on that array?
The OS is NT4, and I'd like to have Disk Administrator show the true physical size of the logical drive, rather than the 500MB or so it's currently showing!

[James_59]

Reboot the server and go in to CTRL-M when the NetRAID banners.
Go to:
Objects
Logical Drives
Properties

Locate Vitrual sizing = Enabled, and hit ENTER
Change to Disable.

Back in the OS, NT will recognize the true size.

If the partition tables exceed true size, chaos will pay you a breif visit.
Re-enable virtual sizing, go back in the OS and fix the partitions. then disable again.

[James Gillies]

Thanks James. I found the setting in the controller setup, but I'm nervous about changing it because I don't want to have to restore the data on the RAID set, even though we've got backups.

The disks in the server are each 9GB (8.6GB formatted). We've currently got an NT volume set (don't ask!) across the last 14GB of the 1st RAID5 set and the first 8.6GB of the 2nd RAID5 set. In other words only a single disk's worth of space has been used, so I'm still well within the physical capacity of the 2nd RAID5 set.

If I turn off virtual sizing for the 2nd RAID5 set and reboot into NT, will I just see a 17.3GB 'disk' instead of the current 500GB one? And will I still have the tail end of my volume set intact?

[James_59 · Accepted solution]

In NT you will see the true space availiable on a reboot.

In Netware 4.x or older, it abends, because the disk signature no longer matches the original capacity.

You will be fine in NT, and if you aren't, you can always re-enable it to go back.