How to resize RAID 1 drives

Hello,

I need to resize my domain controllers to make the Primary drive large enough to upgrade to Win 2003. Currently I am running Win 2000. I have two 34GB drives that are mirrored. The C drive is 4GB and the D is 30GB. When I look at the drives in Acronis I see the two physical drives and each one has the same two partitions.

What is the procedure for decreasing the D and then increasing the C drive?

Do I run Acronis on both physical drives?

Do I do this all in one session and then re-boot or should I work on the D first then follow up with the C drive expansion?

Thanks in advance for your help.

 

Hello DonP,

Thank you for your interest in Acronis Disk Management Software.

Could you please clarify what type of RAID controller do you use? Please also clarify if you encounter this problem when you run Acronis Disk Director Suite 9.0 from Windows or while booted from a Bootable media? Please make a screen shot of the main window of Acronis Disk Director Suite 9.0.

Download Acronis Report utility available at http://www.acronis.com/files/support/AcronisReport.exe and run it, create a report and send it to us. This would provide us with detailed information on the hard disk partition structure.

Please collect the information requested above and contact us from our web-site: http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/my/support/ . Please don't forget to send the link to this thread along with gathered information. This would allow us to investigate the problem and help you with the solution.

Thank you.
--
Semyonov Vasily

 

I am looking to do the same thing. I have a Dell 4600. The controller is a Perc 3/Di, and the configuration is Raid 1, with two physical Drives.
Currently the Raid 1 drive has two partitions, C and E. I wish to delete the
E partition and expand the C partition to take the empty space left by the
deleted E drive.

I have tried this on a non-raid drive with absolutely no problem. Will I be able to accompllisth this on the Raid drive?
THank you

 

Hello New User,

Thank you for your interest in Acronis Disk Management Software.

Acronis Disk Director Suite 9.0 supports hardware RAID-1 arrays. Please follow the instructions in my previous answer to this thread in case you experience any troubles with your RAID array.

We are always at your service should you have any further questions.

Thank you.
--
Semyonov Vasily

 

We arer using the HP RAID controller that comes with the server. When I try to shrink the D drive I get a message saying Unable to Write Script File. I then have to cancell out and it doesn't save the changes. I am running the software in Windows. Do you have any information on this error?

 

Hello DonP,

Please note that your mirrored hard disk drives should be recognized by Acronis Disk Director Suite 9.0 as one hard disk if you use a hardware RAID controller. If it is not so please create a screen shot with the error message you receive and send it to us along with the information requested in my previous post.

Thank you.
--
Semyonov Vasily

 

Hello,

This is becoming a major problem for us since we contactd Acronis before we purchased the product to make sure it would work for mirrored drives. This is setting us back on getting our domain upgraded to 2003 AD. We need to solve this since our PDC and BDC are on small C partitions and we have plenty of space on our D drive.

This error comes up when I try to commit the changes.

Please note that I contacted your support center via email and told them that Acronis displays my mirrored hard drives as two drives. I asked them if I needed to re-size both or only one. They said resize one and the other one would automatically re-size. Here is a copy of the email from your staff. Now you are telling me that they should show up as one drive?

Hello Don,

Thank you for using Acronis Disk Director Suite.
(http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/diskdirector/)!

Please be aware that you do not need to resize the both hard drives. You should resize the one hard drive and the second hard drive should have resized automatically.

Thank you.
--
Sincerely yours,
Konstantin Karikov

Acronis, Inc

 

Here is a screen shot of how Acronis sees my hard drives. We only have two drives in the server and they are mirrored.

 

Hello DonP,

Please let me know your Acronis request # which was sent to you in autoreply to your letter to Acronis Support Team. I will take care of it.

Thank you.
--
Semyonov Vasily

 

The request number was Acronis #378669. I am not trying to get anyone in trouble I just want a solution.

Does this mean you are dropping this dialog and there is no solution? Why am I seeing two drives for my mirrored set if there should be only one?

 

Acronis Supprot,

Please let me know if you have dropped this or are working on a solution! If this has been dropped I would like a refund since the product will not work as promised.

 

Hello,

-OS: Windows 2000 AS
-Mobo: 875 pbz with ICH5R
-Intel Application accelerator RAID edition
-Old disks: Seagate 120 Gb
-new disks: Maxtor diamondmax 10 200 Gb

I have had similar problems resizing raid volumes on a server on an Intel 875PBZ motherboard (iCH5R controller). We have found a solution though!!!

1) Remove the faulty drive of the mirror (or just one of the drives if you only need to increase the size), and put in a larger new drive (new drive 1)
2)Rebuild the volume. This will convert the new drive 1 to a raid disk and copy all the data of the raid volume on it. This disk will NOT be usable as a standalone drive as it contains RAID info on it! In other words, turning off raid in BIOS e.g. will make this drive non-bootable
3)Optional: Do the same thing with the second new drive (new drive 2) for added security. This is RAID-1 backup (together with the original disks) if something goes wrong.
4)Reset the new disk 1 tot non-raid in the Intel Raid BIOS (Ctrl-I) at boot. Contrary to what Intel is saying this did, in our case at least, NOT destroy the data on the disk and make the disk bootable as a standalone drive (non-raid disk). Do NOT delete the RAID-volume as this DOES destroy the data on the disk (God knows why) and make it non-bootable
5)Resize the partitions on new disk 1 to use all the available space (mind the 137 GB limit on some OS's)
6)If the new drive 2 was also converted to raid, reset it too after you are sure the OS has booted properly and is Ok with the new resized new disk 1.
7)Boot with the 2 new disks as standalone disks
Create a new RAID-1 volume in the Intel Application accelerator RAID edition or the Intel Matrix Storage Manager. This will copy all the data of new disk1 on the new disk 2 and create your RAID-1 volume.
9)Hopefully you are now done.


I don't know if this will work with other raid controllers, but the main point here is that the Intel info about reseting a raid-disk to a non-raid disk is wrong: the data is still there and fully functional!

Good luck!!!!

 

Hello DonP,

Please accept our apologies for the delay with the response. Please check your e-mail box. I've sent you an answer to your request.

Thank you.
--
Semyonov Vasily

 

Looks to me like you are using windows software mirroring and not hardware mirroring.