Extending a Raid

[Kyle]

We have a primary school that has a server running 2003 (its an oldish server), From what i can gather from the people at the school (the old part time tech left and has not been too helpful when contacted since) that the raid was configured with 5 disc, 4 in the raid and one as a hot swap. A drive in the raid went down and the hot fix drive took over as it should. An LEA tech came in and swapped the faulty drive out, but from what i can gather he did not add it as a hot fix but added it to the raid to extend it.

I know very little about raid at the moment so need some advice. I went in to Computer Mg-mt on the server and noticed a extra disk which is showing up as not initialized. I initialised it and the right clicked it for the options. I get 'Convert to Dynamic' or 'Convert to GPT'

All the disc in Compmgmt show as basic, What do i need to do now. Is there a way to add the extra space to the raid or not? What are my options?

Please keep your answers/instructions as basic as possible as i have no Raid experience.

By the way it is Intel Software Raid.

[plexer]

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device...PT-on-x64.mspx

What are the other drives GPT or dynamic?

Make it the same as the others.

Normally for s/w raid it's dynamic but may be different with the intel s/w

Ben

[djm968]

Normally you cannot extend a RAID without re-initialising it which will erase all the data.

I would either configure it as a hot spare or just use it as an extra disk.

[Geoff]

That sucks.

[djm968]

I know and even if you could, windows will not let you extend the system/boot partition anyway?

[Geoff]

I'll stick to EVMS I think.

[CyberNerd]

I'll stick to EVMS I think.

interesting, I'm using mdadm. Is it worth converting?

[Geoff]

Yes, it's a lot more flexible. Plus the snapshot feature is great for hot backups.

[CyberNerd]

fantastic, I'll look into it (hopefully, when I get time). The snapshots might solve my zimbra backup problem.
thanks

[Kyle]

Normally you cannot extend a RAID without re-initialising it which will erase all the data.

I would either configure it as a hot spare or just use it as an extra disk.

Bugger.......

[spc-rocket]

Normally you cannot extend a RAID without re-initialising it which will erase all the data.

I would either configure it as a hot spare or just use it as an extra disk.

That's not entirely true as you can get the utilities which are usually from the RAID controller's manufactur which allows you to add an extra drive to an existing array. There are two ways to do this, 1) when the system is up, i think you use the utility in windows or other OSs or other is to shut the server down and use the BIOS utility to do this.

These utilities are installed on our server and work from both Windows and BIOS.

Ashok.