How to Extend Boot Drive on W2K Server

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The server I’m working with is an old Compaq Proliant ML370 running Windows Server 2000 Standard with Citrix Presentation Server 4. There’s only one hard drive. On disk 0, volume 1 system C drive (fat), volume 2 is utilities no drive letter, volume 3 boot D drive (ntfs), and volume 4 is tiny unallocated space.

Volume 3 D drive is nearly out of space and I won’t have a chance to replace this server until the end of the year. I must install a software upgrade on this server but can’t until I have more space.

So far I’ve added a larger second hard drive (both are hot swap)and made both disks dymanic. I mirrored disk 0 volume 1 and volume 3. The result on disk 1 is volume 1 system C drive (fat), volume 2 boot D drive (ntfs), and volume 3 is unallocated space.

I would like to now expand disk 1 volume 2 boot D drive to use up the remaining unallocated space.

The Googled information I’ve found thus far is a little confusing as it pertains to boot and system. They assume, I’m sure, that boot and system are one and the same and reside on same volume. Some say I can’t expand it and some say I can but it’s not clear.

For my next step, so far it looks like my best bet is to shutdown, pull disk 0, attempt multidisc boot and get to dos prompt, edit boot.ini to point to disk 1 and volume 2, and boot up. Then to expand or extend it looks there’s something called diskpart.exe that I could try using from dos.

Is this going to work? Is there a better or easier to do I’m trying to do?

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Have you considered the possibility of using an image utility to move the entire volume to a new larger partition? In Win2000 days, such utilities were pretty scarce, but there are at least 2 that are considered pretty robust – Shadow Protect and True Image, and there are several others as well. Also, you may need a partitioning utility since the new drive has already been partitioned. I would be rather dubious about the approach you suggest – but it’s not something I’ve ever attempted. Perhaps Joe or one of the other gurus who mess with this stuff regularly will chime in.

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I’m not going to be any help on this one. Sorry. I try to stay as far away as possible from disk partitioning in general but especially on servers.

Joe

--Joe

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Can’t say I would relish it either – I’d just as soon buy a new server considering the amount of time it would take, or maybe get a root canal…

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If this project is a must do then I would be most comfortable doing it with a product like ShadowProtect Server edition. It has the ability to image a server live and restore to a large disk. Is it a production server, can you have downtime?

Dynamic disks are the devil in my opinion but Shadowprotect can image them but it will restore back to a disk as basic partitions as expected which I don’t think would be an issue in your scenario as the only reason you converted to dynamic disks in the first place is lack of space.

The product is not cheap but I think you could find other ways of making it pay for itself with its VSS and HIR restore functionality.

Which ever route you take, may the force be with you

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Dell’s Extpart can expand the boot volume. I’ve used it a number of times.
http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&releaseid=R64398&formatcnt=2&fileid=83929

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Extpart only does basic disks and you have dynamic ones.

If that Compaq has hot swap disks it will have a RAID controller, so you don’t need to use Windows for mirroring, although you can’t make a non-RAID disk RAID without losing the data.

Unfortunately extending dynamic disks is an expensive task, either you buy server grade software to do the job or you re-build. Given you have hardware RAID I would re-build, although that won’t give you much extra space if the disk is already full.

cheers, Paul

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