NW 5.1 sp3 move to larger disks?

[chughes]

Hi Folks, I'm in trouble... again......

I have 4 drives. 18gb

I have 3 partitions 17gb, 12gb, 4 gb.

partitions are mirrored (compaq dl380 server)

I'd like to break the mirrors, replace the one 18gb drive with
72 gb drive, remirror, pull the other side and replace it
with 72 gb...... theoretically letting me move to larger partitions?

or am I not going to be able to do this.... I'll have to
break the mirror, put in a 72 gb drive, create a new partition copy the data over from the 18gb drive,
replace the 18gb drive with 72gb drive and create mirror again?

thanks in advance for any help/criticism, jokes at my expense.
Chris Hughes
sysadmin
Triangle Package Machinery
chughes@trianglepackage.com

 

[Beaghler]

Chris-

Unfortunately, what you want to do won't work. Mirrors have to be the same size. To accomplish what you want to do, you are looking at a weekend project, a re-install of Netware and restore.

If possible, I would RAID it with a hot spare. Using 4 new 72 Gb drives, that will give you about 144 Gb usable space with redundancy. You'll have to get a RAID array controller to do this. I've been using RAID for several years without issue.

If this isn't an option, try this: Mirror 2 of the 18 Gb drives for your SYS. Make as big a DOS partition as you can, probably 2 Gb. Make the rest of this mirror a netware partition. Install Netware and use 6-10 Gb for SYS. Don't install anything except NetWare files and utilities here. Use the rest of the 18 Gb as another volume for utilities such as your backup, antivirus, etc.

Mirror 2 72 Gb drives, partition as a netware partition, carve off volumes as desired and restore your data to these. If you use the same server name, ID and IP address, and data volume names, all your login scripts, printing, etc should come up fine after a restore.

Read and understand at least the following TIDS: 2924690, 10010933, 10027322. If this is the only server, You'll have to be sure to save the NDS before doing this. If there are others, be sure that the master replicas for all partitions on the server are located on other servers. Install the server into a dummy tree, then move into the production tree or restore the NDS from where you saved it. Unless the tree is really small, don't try to save to a floppy, save the NDS to a file on a workstation. Be sure to have a good back-up to restore your data. Verify it before starting.

Good luck.
Steve

 

[chughes]

dangit.
i'd like to avoid a re-install if at all possible.
how about I throw two of the 72 GB drives in,
make a mirrored nw partition, copy the data over
from one of the original partition, (Or retreieve from
tape), then rename the original partition and change the name of the new partition to the name of the original partition?

I'm hoping that if the partition name is the same, then
everything else should be happy; if I pull the file structure off of tape, then nds attributes should remain intact - owner, permissions and such.

I've only got one server - so no replicas or anything
cozy such as that. I"ll read those TIDS and probably
try (stupid/easy/unsuccessful) approaches and then end
up doing as you describe.....
Thanks for the advice!

btw - if I upgrade to NW6 then I should be able to grow the
partitions dynamically (seems like it worked at the demos, and on the nw6 machine I built for testing).

again,. thanks for the advice; let me know if you have further thoughts on my dilemna.

Thanks,
Chris

 

[Beaghler]

Chris-

I think you're asking for some trouble and a lot of work. One big thing with your idea is to make sure that the new drives are bootable, then get a good copy of netware that will load. I admit I haven't done what you are thinking about before, but it seems to me like you could end up spending a lot more time fiddling with this than you would with a rebuild.

I've been working with the NW6 NSS this week, after I found that I didn't understand what I was doing. What you say is correct. the volumes will grow dynamically up to the total size of the disk or the restrictions you would place on them.