Unallocated disk space not showing up on Proliant DL 380

[Eric Hutchinson_2]

I have a Proliant dl 380 g5 running windows server 2008. I am just about out of space on my c:\ drive. It was built on a raid 1+0 which had two 36 gig drives. In an effort to increase the size of the c:\drive I took one of the 36 gig drives out and put in a 146 gig drive. When the mirror was rebuilt I put another 146 gig drive in and let the mirror rebuild again. Now when I went into disk management the unallocated space did not show up so I could extend the volume. I tried to rescan the drives and do a refresh but still no go. I ran the windows based array configuration utility and you can see the unused space in the sas array 1 logical drive. Is there a way to merge the unused space in the sas array 1 logical drive to the used space without destroying the volume? 

[Jimmy Vance · Accepted solution]

You need to extend the logical drive using ACU before Windows will see the new space

Look at page 25 in this guide

http://www.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c00709035.pdf

[Mark Matthews]

You may still not be able to enlarge your C: / boot drive without losing the lot.

Can be done with something like Partition Magic or Gparted but its very risky!

You'll find that even if you covert the disk to Dynamic in Windows (to try to expand it), because your C: existed BEFORE you converted it, you cannot expand it that way, ever...

Best bet is always to backup, recreate as a larger logical drive and rebuild / restore Windows I'm afraid.

By all means try the first method, but have a good backup first!

[waaronb]

Windows 2008 can expand an NTFS partition into unused space, no problem.

As the other comment mentioned, you do need to extend the logical array into the new space using the array config utility (ACU or SSA).

[Eric Hutchinson_2]

Will the server continue to operate as normal while the extension happens or will performance be downgraded somewhat?

[waaronb]

Performance will be degraded somewhat during any online expansion or rebuild events.

You can adjust the priority of those things in the advanced controller settings.  I think they're at "medium" by default which is a mix of keeping performance up while the rebuild is happening.  You can set the priority of an expansion to low.  It will take longer to finish re-striping things but it won't impact the system as much while that's happening.

Or if you need it to finish quicker and don't care about the performance hit as much, set it to high priority and set it back to whatever when it's done.

[Eric Hutchinson_2]

Thanks Jimmy and waaronb that worked. It only took about 20 minutes to extend the partition from 36 to 136 gig in the ACU. Once  that was done a quick rescan in Disk management showed the unallocated space. I was able to extend the partition.

Thanks again

[waaronb]

Thanks for updating us. It's always nice when things work just like you think they should. :)