Adding Hard Drives

[Little-Miss]

Right bear with me here! lol

Over the next couple of days Admin are getting their SIMS server replaced. This leaves me with a spare box. This box is the exact same model as my old DC which is now working along side my DC doing a bit of replication etc.... Now known as curricsvr3.

So, Curricsvr3 is running out of space. Is there anyway i can take the HDD out of redundent Admin and put them into Curricsvr3? Guessing its not that simple and a bit of disk management and formatting is going to be needed?!

[srochford]

Do you just have a C: partition on the curricsrvr3 box? If so, you can ghost it and expand the partition onto the new drive, take out the old drive and leave just the new one.

If there's more than one partition then you can still do it with Ghost - it's just a bit more work.

[Ric_]

If it's a bog standard single hard disk, just plug it into the server and provision it in disk management like you would do on a workstation.

[djm968]

Physically installing the Disk(s) shouldn’t be an issue as long as you have space inside the server enclosure and the required connections available. What may be a little more difficult to achieve is utilising the new disk space in a way that will provide additional free space on your existing drive(s)

[Little-Miss]

There's defo space in the box

If i plug them in they will just show up in disk management, right?

[Little-Miss]

If i shove one in as an experiement...will anything blow up?!

[elsiegee40]

If i shove one in as an experiement...will anything blow up?!

I love your phraseology!

Make sure that everything's backed up and nothing critical is running before you do anything!

Is there a reason you don't want to use this spare server as a file server on the network instead of moving the hard drives?

[SYNACK]

First things first, are these drives in a RAID array in the destination server. If they are, lets say OS as 2 disks in RAID1 (Mirror) and your controller supports higher levels and migration.

If you add in the new disks and then in the RAID console/Config utility migrate the existing set to RAID1+0. You can then add the new two disks to the set doubling the avalible space. You could also migrate to RAID5 which would tripple your avalible space. If the server supports hot swapping you should be able to do all of this without even truning off the server.

If the above is the case then once you have done the migration and allowed it to finish the extra space should show up as free space at the end of the drive in Disk Manager under Computer Manager. You can then use the diskpart command to extend one or both of the partitions from inside Windows again while leaving the system live.

I have made a whole bunch of assumptions about your current setup so this may not be of any use however if the conditions are all met (hotswap, live migration etc.) you should be able to pull the whole thing off without even powering down the server.

Full backups beforehand etc. are always advised.