Resizing Lun's/Partitions, and Dynamic disks

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crdafoe
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Aug 07, 2008 12:19 am

Thu Aug 07, 2008 1:00 am

We have a system with a Coraid SR1521 and a Coraid VS21 Logical Volume manager. Connected to this are 4 Windows 2008 64bit servers. The SR1521 has (1) 4 TB Raid-5 array that is split up using the VS21, which divides the space up into Lun's. Then the Windows 2008 servers use Starport to mount the Lun's. I can successfully create a Lun on the VS21 and mount it on the server, then partition and format the disk, and all of that works fine.

Here is my question though: How can you resize the partition on the Windows 2008 server? For instance, first if I create a Lun on the Coraid VS21 that is, say, 5 GB in size, I then can mount it with Starport. Then I can partition and format it (Ntfs), and I then have a 5 GB drive that is accessible. I then can go back onto the Coraid VS21 and use the "grow" command to increase the Lun size to, say 10 GB. Then I'll go back to the server, unmount the Lun in Starport, then remount it, and if I go into the Drive Management on the server, I see my original 5 GB partition, that is still formatted and has data in it, and I also see my additional 5 GB partition. Server 2008 has a feature in Drive management to "Expand" the partition size, but while the feature is not greyed out, if I go into it, the new 5 gb increase doesn't show up.

You mentioned in this thread: http://www.starwindsoftware.com/forums/ ... +partition that "Full-blown Dynamic disk support" would be available in Server 2008. Does that mean that I can partition a Coraid Lun as a Dynamic disk? Or if not, by what means can I resize the partition on the Windows server?

Thanks for the help

Chris
Val (staff)
Posts: 496
Joined: Tue Jun 29, 2004 8:38 pm

Tue Aug 12, 2008 8:35 am

Hi,

StarPort 3.6 is unable to recognize on-the-fly that an AoE device has changed it's size.
So dismount and mount the Coraid volume after adding space to it.

You need not convert the disk to dynamic to encrease your existing NTFS partition(s).

On the Windows side use the disk partitioning tool (DISKPART.exe) to add the free space to the existing NTFS volume created over the Coraid disk.

DISKPART.exe -> EXTEND {drive}
Last edited by Val (staff) on Tue Aug 12, 2008 8:47 am, edited 1 time in total.
Best regards,
Valeriy
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