Adding a new hard drive?

[DirtDawg]

Working on a compaq proliant 1600 4 hard drives windows 2000 and exchange 5.5 fully service packed. Running a raid 5 with the Compaq Array utility and just one large drive as a basic disk. Windows is broken into 2 drives C: for OS and D: for priv.edb and pub.edb. I want to add an extra hard drive into the configuration without having to restore the data. Is there any possible way of doing this?

 

[chester27]

So long as the new drive is the same size, you can plug in the drive and expand the array to include the new drive. Use compaq array utility, and view the help file from it.

 

[DirtDawg]

Will Win2000 add the free space into the already created drives or will I have to do something more to add the free space to the already created drives?

 

[Zelandakh]

Windows won't automatically grow the volumes. If they are W2K dynamic drives you can expand them.

 

[Vos]

Zelendakh is right, you'd need to upgrade your disks to dynamic in order to expand the array without restoring all the data from backup.

This assumes your controller card supports expanding an array as all newer Compaq Smart Array cards do, iirc.

Vos