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Some info before we start:
Windows 2012R2
IBM M5015 HBA
10x 4TB HGST NAS HDDs
I recently added 4x 4TB drives to my existing R5 array with 6x 4TB drives. This brought the array to, you guessed it, 10x drives at 32.7TB, formatted. The process took a week, as I didn't want to scrub the data and start from scratch. Once the drives were added to the array, I tried to extend the current partition to include the include the new space. This is when I learned about allocation/cluster size. So, I didn't want to lose my data, and couldn't back all of it up (I know, I need to order drives for my backup server that's just powered off in the rack), so I created a new partition in the new space, set the allocation size to 32KB, and started to copy over as much data to the new partition as I could. My plan was to fill up the new partition, shrink the old one, extend the new one, copy over the rest of my data, delete the old partition, and then extend the new partition to include every bit of the 32.7TB I had available to me.
The problem... Is that I couldn't shrink the old partition. No matter how much I shrunk it, Windows said that I didn't have enough space. Okay, well luckily, I had an empty 5.5TB R5 partition that I could dump the rest of my data too. So I did that, and then deleted the old partition. Easy, right? Well, Once I did this, I extended the new partition to include the unused space, but Windows decided to convert this disk, in the process, to a dynamic disk instead of basic. To top that off, the one partition appeared as if it was 2 partitions on the same disk, but it was still one.
Well, I've never seen this before, so I shrunk the old non-partition, and tried to extend the new non-partition. Well, this just created 4 non-partitions instead of 2, as seen below. I researched the problem a bit, and found that using AOMEI's Dynamic Disk Converter, I could convert the disk from dynamic to basic without data loss. Well then! I went ahead and got that, followed the steps, and at the end of it all, it said that it couldn't do it to a disk that was over 2TB. SMH...
All of the data is there, and is accessible, without any noticeable issues. Could this potentially be a problem? Is there any way to fix this without having to backup my data and build the array again from scratch?
Windows 2012R2
IBM M5015 HBA
10x 4TB HGST NAS HDDs
I recently added 4x 4TB drives to my existing R5 array with 6x 4TB drives. This brought the array to, you guessed it, 10x drives at 32.7TB, formatted. The process took a week, as I didn't want to scrub the data and start from scratch. Once the drives were added to the array, I tried to extend the current partition to include the include the new space. This is when I learned about allocation/cluster size. So, I didn't want to lose my data, and couldn't back all of it up (I know, I need to order drives for my backup server that's just powered off in the rack), so I created a new partition in the new space, set the allocation size to 32KB, and started to copy over as much data to the new partition as I could. My plan was to fill up the new partition, shrink the old one, extend the new one, copy over the rest of my data, delete the old partition, and then extend the new partition to include every bit of the 32.7TB I had available to me.
The problem... Is that I couldn't shrink the old partition. No matter how much I shrunk it, Windows said that I didn't have enough space. Okay, well luckily, I had an empty 5.5TB R5 partition that I could dump the rest of my data too. So I did that, and then deleted the old partition. Easy, right? Well, Once I did this, I extended the new partition to include the unused space, but Windows decided to convert this disk, in the process, to a dynamic disk instead of basic. To top that off, the one partition appeared as if it was 2 partitions on the same disk, but it was still one.
Well, I've never seen this before, so I shrunk the old non-partition, and tried to extend the new non-partition. Well, this just created 4 non-partitions instead of 2, as seen below. I researched the problem a bit, and found that using AOMEI's Dynamic Disk Converter, I could convert the disk from dynamic to basic without data loss. Well then! I went ahead and got that, followed the steps, and at the end of it all, it said that it couldn't do it to a disk that was over 2TB. SMH...
All of the data is there, and is accessible, without any noticeable issues. Could this potentially be a problem? Is there any way to fix this without having to backup my data and build the array again from scratch?