Extend volume not supported under Linux? (ACU)

[Ronnie_16]

Now, what does this mean?
I have expanded an array of 3 discs to a total of 9 discs in a RAID 5 configuration because the 3 discs are full.
In order to see the (new) unused space I booted with the ACU cd and tried to extend volume, but got a big warning popup saying that extending a volume under Linux is not supported (possibly the same with win2000
I was thinking of extending the volume, then use parted and resize2fs to use the bigger array. Is this not possible?
The system is Gentoo 2.6 and the array is ext3 on a MSA500.

[James Ruddell, CISSP]

The only way I've extended a Linux partition is with LVM. My experience is with RedHat and this is the only method they'll support.

Jim

[Ronnie_16]

Thanks for your answer James. Actually I got it all working yesterday but forgot to close this thread.

I *think* the "Not supported under Linux" message is only valid when running ACU online (not booting from the CD).

Anyway, the steps for success were:

1. Boot ACU and select "Expand array". This takes some time so I booted into Linux again and let the expansion run with the volume unmounted.

2. Boot ACU and select "Extend volume". This took about 3 hrs, from 290 GB -> 1175 GB. Again, I let the server run other stuff meanwhile with array still unmounted.

3. Resize partition. Reboot linux, run fdisk. First delete the partition and the add it again using default values (this selects entire disc). Important that first sector is the same as before, or else you can lose data. In my case start sector was 1.

4. Resize filesystem. I've read here and there that some file utils have problems with ext3 so I first converted it to ext2, just to be on the safe side:
tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/discs/disc1/part1.

Then just run
resize2fs /dev/discs/disc1/part1
to use the entire partition size. When it was done,
resize2fs -j /dev/discs/disc1/part1
rebuilt the journal (ext3).

Voilá