Extending Server 2003 Partition Help Needed

Dsrt

Baseband Member
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I have a fresh install of Windows 2003 Server Standard Edition. I have a 15 gig partition that holds the OS and the remaining 261 gigs are on a separate partition that holds our main database.

I'm getting to the point where I need to add another drive to the existing database partition.

Right now they are set up as basic disks. I'm assuming I can convert them to dynamic disks then just extend the volume to cover the new hard drive that I put in. If I'm wrong here and I have to have some kind of partition "magic" software, please let me know. The new drive will be in sometime this week.

Thanks for your patience.
 
Windows will be fine with Dynamic disks as you have said, but there is one problem,

using the windows raid, or even buying a raid capable card and using hardware raid,

the drives will have to be formatted... so you'll need to detatch your database and put it somewhere safe whilst that happens.

Partition magic won't really do this either,
Also you need to be aware that when you make the entire disk dynamic, (because of your current configuration) your windows partition will also be made dynamic, and there could be some problems there...

The best (my opinion only), if not most time comnsuming/costly to to do this...

Get another 280GB disk, (getting a disk the same size will ensure no space is wasted when using raid striping).
and get a small disk, I think the smallest you can buy now is about 40GB.

Put the first small disk as the primary master on IDE1, and put the CD drive as primary slave on the same IDE.

Now put the 2 280GB disks, (one master one slave onto IDE2).

Re-install windows on the 40GB disk.
Now take the two 280GB disks and make a raid 0 stirpped disk, (upgrade disks to dynamic first) this will show up as one large, (580GB) disk,

Now put your database on the two array disks... and of course reattach the database...


Now I'll explain the reasoning behind this plan.

Firstly, if you just buy another 280GB disk, 15GB will be lost, because a raid 0 uses that same amount of space on each disk.

Secondly, upgrading the system partition so that it's on a dynamic disk can cause problems, (and they can be fairly serious problems, like the system won't boot anymore)

The reason for insisting that the two database disks go on the same IDE ribbon and are not shared with the CD is that the Hard drive buss speed is allways faster than the CDs ATA speed...

hard drives now are all over ATA66 whilst CDs are still only ATA33, or ATA66, so the bus speed is slower... This may be acceptable for the system to access windows files a little more slowly, but there is little point buying new high capacity high speed drives and then limiting them!
 
For interests sake:

Partition magic does not support any server OS's. You would need to purchase symantec/powerquest volume manager which costs a bundle more.
 
Ok, I need to add some more information. This should help.

The machine in question is a Dell PowerEdge 2600 running the Perc4/di raid controller. Right now it has 3 - 146 gb HD's running raid 5. As I said before, we have two partitions, on for the OS and the other is for the database.

We want to add another 146 gb drive to the array. Adding it to the raid array is simple, but figuring out how to tell the OS to apply this new drive to just the partition that the database is on is where I'm running into issues.

Dell suggested something like server magic, but then I found in the Disk Management utility of the Windows 03 Server software that you can actually convert to Dynamic Disks and span the volume across new added disks. Is this accurate or will I actually have to purchase either Server Magic or as the one post suggested, the Symantec Volume Manager utility?

I'm sorry for any confusion I caused by not giving you all this information.
 
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