DL380 G2 Hard Drive Upgrade

[CA1361221]

Hello Everyone

I need to upgrade the storage capacity of my Proliant DL380 G2 server. I wish to upgrade a RAID 5 which is only used for storage from 3x U3 36.4GB drives to 3x U320 72.8GB drives. I have a RAID 1+0 with the operating system on. The Server is running Windows 2000 server and it has a Smart Array 5i controller.

I'm new to this so any advice you can give me will be very useful indeed. I am pretty clear about what firmware to upgrade and how I can actually swap the drives one by one and wait for the rebuild to finish. I am a lot less clear as to what I should do once the rebuilding of the final drive has finished. I know I will need to expand the array to use the extra space but I am not sure what this involves and how to do it.

Thanks for any help you can give me.

Pete

[Ron Moody]

You will have to rebuild the server to do this.
Get your data and boot to the Smart Start CD and let the wizard help you rebuild. SS is very useful and pretty simple to use.
After you get the server rebuilt, you can restore your data..

[Stephen Kebbell · Accepted solution]

Ron, I can't agree with that. I think Peter is on the right track.
Make sure you have a working backup before you begin.
After the last drive has rebuilt, go into ACU. You should see unused space in your Array B (I would guess it's B). You can then extend the logical drive. When that's finished you will see in Disk Management some free unused space at the end of your "Disk x". You can use diskpart to expand the partition. Have a look on Microsoft's site for information on Diskpart. You should not have too many difficulties as you are not going near your boot drive.

Regards,
Stephen

[CA1361221]

Thanks for your help. Did the upgrade on Saturday, and just finished Expanding using Diskpart. It all went very smooth and even finished ahead of schedule!