Real-World Win Server 2000 RAID/HD Question>>>

94jedi

Hey all, I wanted to run something by the guru's (all of you lol). One of my branches has a single Win Server 2k box (Dell Poweredge sc1600). It's the only server at that branch, therefore it's the DC.

Now, my dilema:

The box has two virtual disks - 0 and 1. Both are RAID 1 mirror arrays.

virtual disk 0 - two 36GB scsi drives holds the OS and a second volume that's irrelevant

virtual disk 1 - a 73GB scsi and a 146GB scsi. Total usable space ~ 68GB. This is where their data resides(yes, I knew that I would lose 1/2 of the 146). They are currently down to ~ 7GB of free space. I would like to add some more space as well.

HD 0 in virtual disk 0 has gone bad or "degraded" according to Dell Open Array Mgr. It's one of the 36GB drives. I have access to a replacement 36GB.

Additionally, while I'm there I would like to add another 146 GB scsi to try to give them more space.

My plan is to replace the faulty 36GB drive w/ a replacement, and also break the mirror on virtual disk 2, pull the 68GB, add in the new 146GB, let it rebuild, convert the disc to dynamic from basic, then extend the drive to the full capacity giving them about 136GB of space, ~60GB of which are already consumed. Net gain - ~76GB of space.

Does my plan sound right? Anyone have any other ideas or thoughts? Money is tight for this branch so they want to do this with the smallest investment possible. I already have a 36GB drive, and I'm ordering a new 146 from Dell for about $240 shipped.

Anyone????


thanks!

jibbajabba

Sounds about right... When you just pull the 68GB disk and put in a 146Gb disk, it will rebuild the array leaving some of the space untouched ...

We had a very old raid controller in one of our VERY old HP server and it plain refused to rebuild the array unless it has the exact same size .. but I think this is an exception ...

But on most of the new SCSI HP server all I used to do is pulling the disk (not breaking the mirror, just pulling the disk) and put in a bigger one and extend the array in Windows once the array was rebuild.

Be aware about one thing when using diskpart on Server 2000 :

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/325590

Note In Microsoft Windows XP and in Microsoft Windows 2000, you cannot use Diskpart.exe to extend a simple volume on a Dynamic disk that was originally created on a Basic disk. You can extend only simple volumes that were created after the disk was upgraded to Dynamic disk. If you try to extend a simple volume on a Dynamic disk that was originally created on a Basic disk, you receive the following error message. This restriction was removed in Microsoft Windows Server 2003.

94jedi

thanks for the input. I believe the RAID 1 is non-hardware based so I hope we don't have that same scsi controller issue.