How do I resize a dynamic disk partition?

[JBL312]

My apologies to the group if this question, has already been covered. I did do a search prior to this post. Those search results returned a few threads that really never got to the point.

The text below describes my situation and what I have done to try and resolve it. For those of you who do not have an hour to read it let me just state my question up front. I would like to know what software to use or method/technique to use to resize a partition on a dynamic disk. I have tried Acronis Partition Expert 2003 and this does not support dynamic disks.

My situation is this; I have a Windows 2000 PDC that is dangerously low on drive space. It has a boot drive consisting of three different partitions. The boot partition is 4GB and the other two partitions are 6GB and 8GB in size. Because there is little data stored on the 8GB partition, I would like to resize this partition to 6GB and add the extra 2GB of free space to the 4GB partition.

Here is the main problem, the boot drive has a software mirror and thus the drives have been converted to dynamic disks. I know this configuration to be a problem now, however when I was selecting a software application to enable me to resize the partitions I did not even think to check for dynamic disk support. I incorrectly assumed that purchasing server grade software would support server specific drive configurations, including dynamic disks.

The software that I purchased is Acronis True Image Server 7, and Acronis Partition Expert 2003. The reason that I purchased two separate applications is that I wanted to upgrade the hard drive on another server from a 30GB drive to a 74GB drive and planned to use True Image Server 7 to do it. I should mention before I continue that although these applications do not fully support dynamic disks they are excellent products and I highly recommend them for non dynamic disk configurations.

After installing Partition Expert 2003 on my PDC and finding out that what I wanted to do was not going to be possible with the software I purchased, I began thinking about possible ways to accomplish my intended task. I had had luck in upgrading the hard drives in my other server using True Image Server 7, this server was also configured with a software mirror and the disks were converted to dynamic.

I decided that I would make an image of my PDCs boot drive and apply this image to a 40GB hard drive. I would do this because with True Image Server 7, you are able to select the drive type that you apply you image to. So I would be taking an image of a dynamic disk and applying that to a normal disk thus getting rid of the whole dynamic disk issue. I could then resize the partition create an image of the resized disk and apply it back to the original drive. I would then have to convert it to a dynamic disk and recreate the mirror. Put simply, it did not work.

So that’s where I am at. I returned the server to normal but I still do not have any free space on the boot partition. Has any one attempted to resize a partition on a dynamic disk? Were you able to resize the partition? If you were, how did you go about doing it?

 

[vbrocks]

Check into Partition Magic, I heard it was good...

 

[dholbrook]

Where is the drive that is being the mirror, and how big is it? Are all three drives mirrored?

Since this is the PDC, I ask if there is a BDC in the network. If so, promote the BDC to PDC until you are done with the upgrade to prevent any Domain data loss.

Back up all the data on the original drive to tape or to a file on the second drive (if there is enough room) and use the WIN2k drive manager to repartition the original drive or better yet replace it with a larger drive

Create a boot floppy formatted under WIn2k, and create a boot disk that will boot to the mirror drive. You need to copy all the boot.ini, ntldr, and ntdetect files from the root level of the C: drive, and then modify the boot.ini file to point to the mirror drive, not to the C:drive, so the system will then boot to mirror side once you break the mirror.

Next, break the OS mirror and reboot with the floppy to make sure you can boot with it. You are now up and running on the old mirror drive, and you can then work on the original drive. Now break the other mirrors if thay also exist.

Put the new drive in as the master drive, boot again using the floppy to the old mirror, partition the 40 gb into three sections (give yourself at least 10 GB for the C: drive). You can now use NTbackup.exe, found under OS system32 directory, to do a full backup of the current mirror OS partition (include the system state), saving the file onto the new drive. Now run restore from ntbackup and restore the os to the c: partition and include the system state.

Since the mirror partition boot.ini is the original boot.ini, when you now reboot, the C: partition with the restored OS should be what comes up.

Now you can put the old drive in as the slave and copy the data over from the other partitions and then replace the original second drive after the files have all been copied.

Once the system is fully functional again, put it back on the network and promote it back to the PDC role to receive all updates that may have happened while you were working on the original PDC.

HTH

David