I have a Dell Poweredge with a PERC2 DC hardware raid controller and I'm upgrading the disks from an 18 GB RAID 1 (presenting the OS two logical partitions, including the boot partition) to a 73 GB RAID 1. The PERC2 allows hot swap, which I tried today and moved my mirrored logical paritions over to the 73 GB's. I've go Powerquest Volume Manager arriving tomorrow.

My question is what's the best tactic for upsizing my two logical drives? I'm thinking that it is to move them back onto the 18GB RAID 1 pair, create two new logical partitions from the 73 GB drives (larger of course) and then (hopefully) use Volume Manager to 'move' the data partitions to the newly created logical paritions. I'm assuming this'll require a boot floppy from Volume Manager to do the change over.

I was originally going to 'resize' the two logical parititions like I've done before with Partition Magic on my home box but then I remembered the OS won't even see the extra space on my 73GB RAID 1 pair as the PERC doesn't tell it that it even exists.

Am I on the right track? Anyone have some Volume Manager experience they care to share?

-Zeke

I was originally going to 'resize' the two logical parititions like I've done before with Partition Magic on my home box but then I remembered the OS won't even see the extra space on my 73GB RAID 1 pair as the PERC doesn't tell it that it even exists.

Ouch. Was going to suggest just trying the same method that I know works on all Compaq Smart Array controllers until you said that. With the Smart Array, you can "fail" each drive in the array, and replace it with a larger drive. Once the array is back to normal status, the config program will show a chunk of free space in the defined array, and allow it to either be used to create a second logical drive (a second hard drive to the OS), or to extend the existing logical drive (assuming the OS on the server can support it).

Double check with Dell first to see if this is possible, (as a search on google isn't turning up much for me). If not, the other thing to ensure is that your OS won't be harmed if you later delete the 18gb RAID set after migrating to the 73GB drives. Some controllers may shift around the "virtual location" of the hard drives it presents to the OS, and that could cause the need for recovery.

Good luck. Keep us posted on this, as I'm always interested in how server hardware works from various vendors.

I successfully shifted the data from the 18s to the 73s today by doing this:

Warm inserted both new 73's after reading the PERC FM.
Set 1st 73 as Hot Spare.
Forced 1st 18 off line.
Let the system rebuild RAID on 73.
Put 2nd 73 online as Hot Spare.
Forced 2nd 18 offline.
Let mirror rebuild again.
Prepared both 18's for removal & removed them after they spun down.

Bounced on the OS (w2k Server SP2) for a bit.

Rebooted, crossed fingers and was very happy to see the OS come up no problem.

The mirror regens took only about 10 minutes each and the OS didn't burp in any way.

So now I have my two 18's sitting on my desk, which will probably go back in tomorrow. The PERC console is a horrendous circa 1996 interface. I don't think it supports extending the logical partitions. The bios version may, but I didn't see anything in the manual and I'm running current (ca.2001) firmware on the PERC. We'll see. I'm going to try very hard to avoid the 'restore system from tape onto fresh partitions' routine. I do not trust tapes for the OS stuff even though I use Veritas BENT 8.(?) That and they are ungodly slow. We'll see.

-Zeke