Raid Question

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Sep 9, 2004
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I have a question about a setup....
First a little background on the problem I had.
A customer brought in a Dell XPS 400 with a Mirror Raid Setup with 2 160GB Raptor's one of the drives in the RAID has failed. In the process of looking for a replacement drive i found these drives to cost a small fortune for a new one. Now this customer only uses the computer for home use, no gaming at all. So having 2 10,000 RPM drives is a waste and not needed. Instead of spending 500 dollars on one drive, i just ordered two WD 320GB SATA HD's. This would double the storage and still keep a mirror backup. This is what i did.

First i booted into windows off the one drive that was still a raptor and ghosted the machine, just in case i broke the raid. Second i installed one of the new 320 GB’s along with the 160 GB. The raid utility found the 2nd drive and wanted to rebuild the RAID on windows boot. Just what i thought it would do. So i booted into windows and waited a few hours for the copy to finish. Once it was done i removed the 160GB drive and installed the other 320GB. It did the same thing, found the drive and wanted to rebuild the RAID. Awesome i thought it was going to work and have no problems.

Well windows boots fine, but only shows the drive space as the 160GB, it’s not showing the new space of the bigger drive.

Can i run partition magic to resize the partitions without breaking the RAID?
 
That's because when you rebuilt the array on to the 320's your source was a 160, so it's only going to use the size of the original disk regardless of how big your original is.

To really do it right you should backup all the data- since you have the old HD it sounds like you have that. Then to a fresh install of Windows on the new HDs. That way you'll use all the space, etc.

You could try partition magic but on a RAID array I would be skeptical at best.
 
Well he might need apps and stuff so reinstalling windows might not be an option. What to do is clone the entire drive onto an external so you have a copy incase anything messes up. Then try expanding the partition, if it messes up, all good, you have another copy of the data.
 
Partition Magic hasn't been updated in years, and is fairly likely to break something. Parted Magic is a similar Linux-based option.

As long as the RAID array shows up properly in the partitioning app, it should be able to resize it. I'm pretty sure I manipulated partitions back when I had a RAID0 setup.
 
InvisiBill said:
Partition Magic hasn't been updated in years, and is fairly likely to break something. Parted Magic is a similar Linux-based option.

As long as the RAID array shows up properly in the partitioning app, it should be able to resize it. I'm pretty sure I manipulated partitions back when I had a RAID0 setup.
Click to expand...

That was my problem, after i posted this i booted into the RAID utility and the size of the RAID was only 160GB. So my only option was to rebuild the RAID using all 320GB's. So that is what i am going to do. Customer wanted PC back for Christmas so in January i get to break it and rebuild it :D
 
There is really a simple solution, being as this is a RAID 1 array. All you need to do is put the one good 160GB drive back in (assuming you still have it with it's original data intact) use Ghost (or similar) to do a 160GB partition to 320GB partition drive copy. Remove the 160GB drive, move the 320GB drive to be primary, add your other 320GB drive and let it rebuild the array. Otherwise, the RAID 1 should present itself to partition manipulation software as a single drive/volume (because the array is created at the BIOS level, not by the OS) and should be able to be manipulated without breaking the mirror.
 
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