Upgrade drives in LC2000 but virtual sizing is disabled

[Laurence Blake]

Hi
In one of my LC 2000s running NT 4.0 I have one logical drive under RAID 5. Virtual sizing is disabled. The drives are all 18Gig (four of them) and I have been given 4 * 36 Gig and been told - "put them in soon".

Page 129 of the NetRaid manual paints a bleak picture if virtual sizing is disabled.

I don't mind rebooting, but can I get away without having to reinstall NT on the C partition?

Disk Administrator says:
EISA Utilities 31 MB
C NOSPART NTFS 1953MB
E NTFS 50109MB

I have NetRaid running.

What is my best course of action?

Thanks

Laurence

[Greg Carlson]

Laurence,

Since the LC2000 only hold 6hdds in the hotswap cage it sounds as if you will be migrating from the 18gb hdds to the 36gb hdds. If that is the case your only option is to back up your data on the 18gb hdds. Remove the 18gb hdds, create your array on the 36gb hdds and then initialize the array for a reinstall and restore from backup. Even if you had a netserver with room for 36gb hdds, if you added the 36gb hdds to an array of 18gb hdds you would be losing 18gb from each hdd because the arrays hdd's need to be of equal size.

Your other option would be to keep the 18gb and get an external storage cabinet and just add a second array. Otherwise you are looking at a reinstall/recovery.

On a side note you don't need virtual capacity enabled to add capacity. You just go into Netraid assistant and add the desired hdds into the array and then once the capacity expansion has completed you need to go into disk administrator to configure your added disk storage.