System Partition short of space

[Monty99]

Hello,

I have a System Partition that is on a BAsic Disk in W2K. It now has only 400 MB free space. Is it possible to extend this with free space?

My current drive setup is with 3 drives in RAID 5: 36GB, 36GB and 18 GB (to be repalced with 36GB or more)

Currentlty split into system partition, witjh 3.95 GB, another primary partition of 24 GB and and extended partition of 5.5 gb.

If I were to replace the 18 GB disk with another of 36 GB, could I then extend the system partition? Please help!

 

[richgill]

Your RAID system will be able to increase the usable space to around 70GB if you replace the 18GB disk with a 36GB disk - but I guess destructively! I would take an image of the 3 partitions you have (as well as your usual backup), rebuild the raid using the three 36GB disks, create three new partitions, sized as you wish, and then restore the images to them. Then hope the server boots!

Alternatively, free up some disk space on the C: drive (CCleaner does a good job of that!) or alter your existing partitions to give more space to the C: drive.

 

[pgaliardo]

You should replace your 18GB disk drive because you are wasting the other 2 36 GB Drives. Raid 5 can only use the space of the smallest drive. After you do, you will still need to follow richgill's advice by restoring or use a 3rd party product to extend the C drive. The last time I did something similar, I did a full backup of my server, installed new drives, configured RAID, and the partitions, then did a full restore. This wasn't a domain controller, there are other issues to consider if it is.

Alternatively, you can see if the page file is on C and move it to the larger partition.

 

[NickFerrar]

Step 1 is to fail the 18GB drive, replace it with a 36GB drive and rebuild that into the existing arrary. Once that completes you should then be able to expand the RAID container to occupy the full space across the drives.

Once that's done you'll be left (in Windows) with a chunk of unallocated space. There's no Microsoft supported way to extend the system partition so you need a 3rd party tool. We recently used Paragon Partition Manager to do a similar job and it worked well. Basically leave that chunk of disk space unallocated and the 3rd party utility will be able to extended the system partition using it.

This should all be non-destructive (as in you won't lose the data), however that might depend on the RAID card involved. You should of course backup everything first (the Enterprise version of Paragon Partition Manager includes a very good imaging utility to ensure you get a restorable copy of your system).

 

[Monty99]

Hi Guys.... thanks for all your replies.Most helpfull. Will order new drive and get on with it.

Thanks