Questions on partitioning

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Hi,
When I bought my SBS 2003 server, it was set up as a file store with a huge (well, relatively) D-drive, and a much much smaller C-Drive. The the whole thing is on RAID5, so the partitions / physical drives are inextricably linked.

Big mistake.

My C-Drive is too small now, and I am forever running out of resources since I run a number of programs on it that I hadn’t envisaged when I got it. I need need to resize the partitions and probably double the size of the C-Drive. Can someone recommend a suitable piece of partitioning software? It needs to be reliable and also work across the aforementioned RAID5. I had been going to use PartitionMagic, but now that I come to buy it I see that Symantec have discontinued it. So what is the best alternative?

Many thanks.

Stuart

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Do you have any idea how your raid volumes are built?

If you have a single large raid volume with two partitions it may not be too hard. If you have two raid volumes it may be quite difficult to do what you wish. (you may have the equivilant of a full drive and may not be able to just increase the size of the partition.)

For example, one server I take care of is setup as follows:

8- 148gb drives

c: is on logical disk 1, this is two of the drives in RAID1. To increase the size of this volume, I would have to break the raid volume and add disk space.

d: is on logical disk 2, this is 6 of the drives in RAID5. To increase the size of this volume is simple. I would just need to add another drive and add it into this volume. (assuming I have space in the server and space on the raid controller for more disks.)

Another option you may have is to uninstall some of the programs and install them with the runtime files on drive D:, leaving drive C: with just the operating system.

Whatever you do, be sure to image that server to another drive before you start messing with it..

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I’ve been through this same battle a year or so ago – and with the configuration they way MS recommends you are bound to run into that problem. We fought the problem for about 18 months, and finally migrated the system to a 2008 Server. There is undoubtedly lots of junk on the drive – temp files, install files that didn’t get deleted, etc. And I would do as mercyh suggests and move all of your apps from the C: drive to the D: drive. Also if you are running both Exchange and SQL Server, make sure they put their data files on the D: drives – by default they install on the C: drive.

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Thanks to both of you.

The RAID5 is a single volume spanning whatever the minimum number of physical drives was. There are three partitions on it – the standard C and D (12GB and 285.82GB respectively) and something which is 125MB and called “EISA Configuration”. So I don’t think that I have full drives.

I’ll try moving the apps, although there aren’t that many of them.
What advantages does 2008 give you, or is it more that there is the opportunity to resize when you upgrade?

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2008 (or a new server more correctly) gives you the opportunity to resize the C: drive.

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I’ve run into this problem on several of my client’s servers and I used EASEUS Partition Master to repartition the drives on the fly. http://www.partition-tool.com/

Make sure that you have a couple of good backups!

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I’ve run into this problem on several of my client’s servers and I used EASEUS Partition Master to repartition the drives on the fly. http://www.partition-tool.com/

Make sure that you have a couple of good backups!

That sounds like what I need. I don’t really want to go to the hassle & expense of a new server when it is otherwise working correctly. And I also don’t much fancy fighting to install a couple of extra drives either. But the images – for sure. Wouldn’t do a thing without them!

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12GB!!! Wow, no wonder you are having trouble.

If the partitions are all on one raid volume, you should be able to do as pdonnell suggests and use a partitioning tool to move the partition sizes around. Make sure whatever tool you choose is supported on SBS 2003 and once again, if you value your sanity, IMAGE THE SERVER before you start messing with it.

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That’s an old server if it has an EISA confg partition and only 300GB. Either way it’s just a way to run hardware diags at boot.
The RAID / partition set up is correct. It gives you protection of the OS and data via the hardware RAID.
12GB is never enough for a C: drive and with SBS I would not have less than 100GB. Can you find another disk or two to add the the RAID, then you can make the thing the correct size. Failing that it may be new server time.

cheers, Paul

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There is no fight to install the drives, the hardware RAID will add new drives to the existing without data loss, then you use a partition manager to shuffle the data around – after backup, of course.

cheers, Paul

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Great, thanks. Sounds like a plan.

Cheers,
Stuart

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This past week for a client running a Dell box with Windows Server 2003 and three RAID-5 drives, I replaced the exiting hard drives with lager ones and then used Acronis Disk Director Home bootable CD, to resized the partitions without any problems.

On the hard drives, I hot-swap one old small drive for a larger new one and then let it rebuild the RAID. I then did the same for the second drive and finally the third drive. Took about three hours to do all three drives. Since the RAID volume was setup as dynamic, the RAID controller automatically resized the space used for the partitions to fit the larger drive size.

The partition resizing just took a few minutes. I did do a clone backup via the USB port to an external hard drive as a safety precaution. I still had the original three hard drives that I cold put back in if something went wrong.

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I’m impressed that Acronis was happy with the disk driver. Does it boot from WinPE?

cheers, Paul

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