Resizing Partition on RAID 1 Server Setup?

I’ve got a customer with a Dell PowerEdge 2900 server. It has a PERC5I RAID card with two 250GB hard drives configuration in a RAID 1 mirror. The drive is partitioned with 15GB for the OS on the “C:” drive and 230GB for the user data on the “D:” drive. The “C:” partition has run out of room and the server only has about 75MB of free disk space on the “C:” partition. The “D:” partition still have about 100GB of free space. Wiping the server and re-installing from scratch is not the answer to this problem as they have numerous custom applications which would be very difficult and time consuming.

To fix this my plan is to the do the following:



1. Shutdown the server and remove one of the drives then clone it over to a larger drive say 1TB

2. On the new 1TB HD use Partition Manager 11 Server to resize the “C:” partition.

3. With the server shutdown remove other of the original 250GB drive so now there aren’t and HD’s in the server.

4. Install the single new 1TB drive that has the partitions resized

5. Boot up the server and pray to god it works

6. If so install a 2nd blank 1TB drive and let the server automatically rebuild the RAID 1 mirror

7. Celebrate



My question is does anyone know if this will actually work? I’m not sure how the RAID card will react to a new 1TB with different partition sizes the original drive that are currently installed in the server. It’s my understanding the RAID configuration is actually stored on the drives themselves and not in the hardware controller but again I’m not 100% sure. This server is being using in a small business that has about 40 employees working 6 days a week so there isn’t a whole lot of room for downtime.

 

Hello,

What I would do instead is to perform a complete backup of the old Raid 1 mirror, replace the two hard drives with the 2x 1TB hard drives, configure the mirror and boot to the recovery CD and restore the image.

It's fewer steps and relies less on your raid card to detect an existing mirror to rebuild. This way the image is transferred at the container level, rather than raid level. The image will be as if it's a single disk and restored to a "single disk"