Compaq Smart Array 431, how to expand partition?

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sm8000

Gawd
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Aug 5, 2004
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My boss is worried that the Smart Array 431 won't support a resize of the array. The server in question has a three-drive RAID 5 array, plus a spare. These were 18GB drives, they're now 36. It's in a ProLiant server, can't remember which model.

I put the last drive in today, let it rebuild, what does one do to make use of this extra available disk space, both at the controller and OS level? The OS is Windows 2000 Server.
 
From what I can tell your controller does support OCE but it appears the whitepapers section of HPs site is down right now. We have a few ML series servers at work that I can fondle monday if you can wait that long. Otherwise you could always backup the array, recreate it at the full size then restore the data. Not as sexy as using the expansion functionality of the controller but the other side of that coin is, there will be no need to use a partition resizing app.
 
Thanks, anything you can dig up would be great. We're thinking Partition Magic at the moment, but we would like this to go as quickly, transparently and risk-free as possible as this is a Domain Controller as well as a file server.
 
Cool monday it is then :). I recently replaced a failed 32GB drive in one of the machines and seem to recall the array utility was pretty barebones. As an aside I have used PM on a few occasions and even though it was successful each time, it always seemed dicey for some reason. Don't know if I would trust it on a DC/fileserver but sometimes you have to do what you have to do.

Also I'd run a backup right before beginning the expansion if the server gets heavy use so if things do go horribly wrong you wont have to fall back to the previous night (assuming that you guys do so nightly).
 
Before Symantec purchased them, there was ServerMagic by PowerQuest that would do this..

Now you might be best of with a backup and restore after deleting and recreated the partition.
 
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