System partition too small server 2003

slinuxuzer

Well, fellas I took a new job and found out our front end Exchange server only has 270mb free space on it's c: drive, this is an hp server with three harddrive's installed; I haven't confirmed through the controller utility but I am pretty sure this is going to be a raid five setup.

It's been my experience that you can't use partition magic on a server OS, so I am hoping someone here will tell me I won't have to migrate this thing to new hardware just to fix this very poor configuration error.

As always any help is greatly appreciated.

SWM

I have used Paragon Disc manager numerous times on Server 2003 with no problems.

Depending upon the size of your C and D partitions, start Paragon on a Friday night and it should be finished sometime over the weekend

Good Luck

seuss_ssues

Ive used Acronis Disk Director Server 10.0 to resize about 20 servers earlier this year.

I dont remember the cost but im sure its listed on their website.

astorrs

+1 for Acronis.

Unfortunately with v10 they have split it into "Server" and "Workstation" editions. The workstation one is the same as version 9.0 and before @ $49, the server one is 10x that. Argh, resizing servers for fifty bucks was an awesome deal.

HeroPsycho

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

Only server I had an issue with was a Dell. Used it on several HP's, an IBM, no problem. The Dell was a bit older, so maybe that's why...

theseman

+ 1 for Paragon.

I used it to resize system partitions on both Server 2003 and Server 2008.

RTmarc

Another +1 on using Acronis Disk Director for servers.

royal

I've used Acronis Disk Director on Server 2003 and it's worked great.

dynamik

What type of licensing does Acronis have? Can you use it on any server or is that per machine?

I could justify an expensive backup solution since that would be used repeatedly, but how often do most people repartition their drives?

blargoe

slinuxuzer wrote:

Well, fellas I took a new job and found out our front end Exchange server only has 270mb free space on it's c: drive, this is an hp server with three harddrive's installed; I haven't confirmed through the controller utility but I am pretty sure this is going to be a raid five setup.

It's been my experience that you can't use partition magic on a server OS, so I am hoping someone here will tell me I won't have to migrate this thing to new hardware just to fix this very poor configuration error.

As always any help is greatly appreciated.

How big is the partition?

Check your system32/logfiles for smtpsvc and w3svc logfiles, if you server is heavily used these folders will be full of big log files that you should be able to gain back some of that space.

seuss_ssues

dynamik wrote:

What type of licensing does Acronis have? Can you use it on any server or is that per machine?

I could justify an expensive backup solution since that would be used repeatedly, but how often do most people repartition their drives?

To be honest i didnt purchase the software and i am uncertain about the licensing. I do agree that it does seem like a somewhat expensive purchase just to resize some hard disks.

But if spending $500 to resize partions only once is cheaper than any possible downtime due to insufficient disk space then it is worth it. We could have planned things out and backed up data, reinstalled, and done it all by hand, but frankly it would be cheaper to just buy the software and get it done in a day rather than the amount of time it would take to completely redo all of our servers.

astorrs

dynamik wrote:

What type of licensing does Acronis have? Can you use it on any server or is that per machine?

I could justify an expensive backup solution since that would be used repeatedly, but how often do most people repartition their drives?

I tried grabbing a trial of v10 so I could look at the EULA to see what the rules are related to transferring the software from one server to another but their site is giving me a stupid error. I'll have a look when its working again.

You could probably just use the trial assuming its just time limited and not feature restricted.

marco71

I would add another HDD and move the Exchange database to it, in order to sepparate database from transaction logs; then I would backup transactions (and eventually the database) and only after that I do a partition's resize

HeroPsycho

That's a good idea, except it's a front end server.

blargoe

A FE server shouldn't require THAT much space.

How big is the partition?