Expanding Drives on Fibre Channel Array

The RA4000 and RA4100 fibre array software warns you that you
cannot expand drives when they run under Windows 2000. What is
the observed behavior for such cases? I tried to do it with a
small sample NTFS volume I created, and it worked without any
problems at all.

 

I think you should read the PDF at this link:

http://h200001.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00257511/c00257511.pdf

it lays it out, nice and easy, what you need to bea bale to do to expand
drives under 2000/2003

- LC

 

I suspect your test was successful due to the fact that you extended a
pristine disk?

- LC

 

I was not doing a capacity expansion by increasing the number of drives. I
was doing what they call a drive extension, where in the ACU you extend a
logical device's size onto free space in the array.

Inside of Windows Device Manager, after the extension finishes, I simply did
a Rescan on the drives, at which point the partition I wanted to grow showed
more free space at the end of its logical device. I did an "extend"
operation in Windows Disk Manager and all was okay.

I gather from the article you sent over that there are cases when an
extended logical device can have all of its Windows partitions marked as
"foreign". I didn't really understand precisely what those cases are. It
would have been nice if they had given specific examples.

For sure I am going to make and break mirrors of any partition before
attempting to extend its logical drive.

 

I see. I wrongly assumed that since you were referring to the RA4x00 array
software, that you were dealing with the ACU, or one of its variations. I
did not know that you were expanding from within the windows disk manager.

That changes the landscape considerably ...

- LC

 

I'm doing both:

1) I grow the logical drive using the ACU.

2) Once the ACU finishes drive extension, I then use that available space by
extending the partition in Windows 2000.

The article you reference seems to imply that sometimes when you do 1), all
of the partitions on the extended drive will be marked as foreign and in
effect corrupted. I didn't understand the exact circumstances very well.