Resize partitions on a Raid 0

I have a raid 0 configuration. I previously had a dual boot with XP on disk0 and Vista on disk1. I decided to remove xp since I was hardly using it and am pretty happy with Vista. I now have a 150GB unallocated partion and a 450GB partition for Vista. I want to expand Vista into the unallocated space. Will Disk Director accomplish this on a raid setup? I know that I could format the partitions and reinstall Vista but am not eager to do so. It took a while to get Vista running well and I don't want to start over. Does anyone have experience doing this? Thanks for your help.

 

You should be able to resize the partition using Vista's Disk Management. I think I would try it that way first.

If you use DD 10 (build 2,160) to do it, you may have to run Vista's repair option from the Vista dvd to get it to boot. Also, I would recommend doing the procedure from the rescue cd and not starting it in Windows. If you haven't previously checked, make sure DD can see your RAID drive. If the full mode doesn't work you can try the safe mode which uses the BIOS to access the drives.

In either case, make sure you have a backup of any important files before proceeding as you never know if something will go wrong.

 

Vista doesn't give the option to expand. The way I set up the raid volume, Vista occupies the entire 450 gb partition. I can shrink the volume but expand is greyed out.
Reading the posts in this forum, it seems like its a crap shoot whether DD does what its advertised to do!

 

Maybe I'm not understanding correctly. I thought you had XP and Vista on the RAID drive. Is the Vista partition using the entire RAID volume? Is/was XP installed on a separate hard drive?

DD 10, build 2,160 is supposed to be Vista compatible. I have run several install tests with Vista, and didn't have any problems, but it wasn't anything thorough. If you have TI, you could make a backup image of the Vista drive/partition and then try DD.

However, if there is only 450GB on the RAID array then you won't be able to expand it not matter what program you use.

Another option is to use Dynamic Disks, but those present their own problems. Can't you just partition the old XP's 150GB and assign it a drive letter and use it that way?

Maybe you could post a screenshot of the Disk Management screen so we could see what layout you have?

 

I have a 600gb raid 0 . When I loaded Vista, I partitioned the volume into a 150gb disk for XP and a 450gb disk for Vista. I have since formatted the 150gb disk and it shows as unallocated space. I have two external drives for storage and backups so I prefer to "recapture" the 150 gb space and merge it with Vista recreating one 600gb volume. I can delete the 150gb raid disk in bios but don't think that will allow me to recapture that space without formatting the entire raid volume.

 

What you are showing does not show a RAID array. It shows two separate drives. Disk 0 is probably 160GB unformatted and Disk 1 is probably around 500GB unformatted.

Here is a screenshot of my RAID 0 array. It is all in one entry (Disk 0). The array shows up as a single drive.



Either you don't have a RAID 0 array or it is only Disk 0 or Disk 1. It can't be both unless you have two RAID 0 arrays in your computer.

 

Irrespective of how disk management looks now, its definitely a raid 0.I have two 300 gb internal sata drives. There are no other internal drives. How could there be a 447 gb volume if not in raid? When booting the computer, I see the Intel splash screen showing the raid setup.

 

It looks to me like your RAID utility set this up to appear as two disks to the operating system. Therefore, to undo this and return to a single 600 GB array I think that you'll have to drop back to the RAID controller level and recreate the array.

Do you have TrueImage Home 10? If so, the simplest way to do this is as follows:

1. Create a backup image of your Vista partition using TrueImage running from within Vista. Store the backup on another internal or external hard disk.
2. Delete the current array(s) and create a new single array spanning the entire disk (600 GB) using your RAID utility in the BIOS.
3. Boot into the Vista DVD and start setup. Go only as far as creating a single primary partition. Bail out of the installer at this point. The purpose here is to write the master boot record and partition table.
4. Boot into the standalone version of TrueImage Home and restore the image of the Vista partition to the array. Be sure to use the entire disk for a final partition size.
5. Vista probably won't boot the first time so you'll also have to use your Vista DVD on first boot to repair the installation.

Before doing any of this I highly recommend that you first try booting into the standalone version of TrueImage to make absolutely sure that you can see your current disk array setup correctly.

What do you think, MudCrab? Does this sound right to you?

 

I do have True Image 10 and made a bootable rescue disk.

 

The Raid setup is how the Intel controller set things up. I originally had only XP on the Raid volume. I then reformatted the volume before installing Vista. My Vista version was an upgrade version and to my surprise, I had to have XP visible for the install, hence the partitioning. I can see the difference in how Mudcrab's Raid array appears in disk management.My interest in DD was to hopefully avoid the risk of restoring the drive from backup. I guess there are risks no matter how I proceed.

 

Correct. If your array had consisted of two partitions on the same disk then it would have been a simple matter of using DD10 to delete the first partition and then expanding the second partition to fill the entire disk. I am pretty sure that you will have to fix this with the RAID utility.

 

I agree with Mark's procedure. I've never seen a RAID setup that showed as multiple drives, but I'm still kind of new to the whole RAID thing. I assume it shows as two drives in the BIOS also? Or only in the RAID setup?

On the RAID setups I've worked on, you can only use whole drives so it only shows as one. Just curious, what RAID chipset are you using? Are you using Intel Storage Manager?

 

I have the Intel d975xbx2 motherboard. I built the system in january. It does use the Intel Matrix Storage Manager for Raid. The bios shows volume 1 and volume2 within the array. This is the first time I used a Raid configuration so I assumed how it shows in my disk management is how all Raid arrays are displayed. True Image does show a disk 1 and disk 2 in a raid volume but it reverses the order. In the bios volume 1 is the 150 gb and volume 2 is the 450 gb. True Image lists them opposite, that is volume 1 as 450gb and volume 2 as 150gb?