Windows 2003 Disk drive setup

  • Thread starter Thread starter Chris Rennert
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Chris Rennert

I have proliant ml350 with 3 36.4gb Hotswappable Ultra320 hard drives.
In Windows 2k3 this is the setup that was done before I got here. I
am a programmer by trade, but have taken over as the hardware guy here
as well, and I can basically handle most things, but I we are starting
to get close to being low on space, and I would like to extend it out.

The primary partition is only 7gb, but the extended is 60gb, meaning
that is must span a couple of disks. Does that completely screw me from
running Raid 1? In the Disk Management snap-on it shows that both
partitions are "basic" and not Dynamic?


Thank you for any help you can give me.

Chris
 
Chris said:
I have proliant ml350 with 3 36.4gb Hotswappable Ultra320 hard drives.
In Windows 2k3 this is the setup that was done before I got here. I am
a programmer by trade, but have taken over as the hardware guy here as
well, and I can basically handle most things, but I we are starting to
get close to being low on space, and I would like to extend it out.

The primary partition is only 7gb, but the extended is 60gb, meaning
that is must span a couple of disks. Does that completely screw me from
running Raid 1? In the Disk Management snap-on it shows that both
partitions are "basic" and not Dynamic?


Thank you for any help you can give me.

Chris
Click to expand...
Ok, figured more information out. It is running Raid 5, and again we
have 3 36.4gb Ultra320 disks. In windows, it is configured as one 70gb
logical drive, partitioned into 2 basic drives , an 8gb, system
partition, and a 62gb, data patition (C: & D: respectively).

My issue is 2 years ago, one of the drives failed, bringing down the
whole system , and from what I understand the Boot sector is not
protected, and I believe this is why we had to reinstall to recover.

My thought is to purchase more drives, and migrate to Raid 1, because
fault tolerance is much more important to us than performance. I am not
sure if I am missing something, or if there is a better solution.

I appreciate once again any help you can give me :-)

Chris
 
Chris said:
Ok, figured more information out. It is running Raid 5, and again we
have 3 36.4gb Ultra320 disks. In windows, it is configured as one
70gb logical drive, partitioned into 2 basic drives , an 8gb, system
partition, and a 62gb, data patition (C: & D: respectively).

My issue is 2 years ago, one of the drives failed, bringing down the
whole system , and from what I understand the Boot sector is not
protected, and I believe this is why we had to reinstall to recover.

My thought is to purchase more drives, and migrate to Raid 1, because
fault tolerance is much more important to us than performance. I am
not sure if I am missing something, or if there is a better solution.

I appreciate once again any help you can give me :-)

Chris
Click to expand...

I have no idea which Raid configs the Proliant Raid/SCSI card will support -
so maybe Raid 1 is not a possibility.
That being said, one disk out of 3 going down on a Raid 5 system should not
bring down the whole system.
I have just spent 4 weeks running on 2 out of 3 disks while waiting for the
3rd disk to come back from repair.

Usually boot problems with a half dead Raid come from software mirroring -
and can be fixed by a simple change in the boot command file.

I suspect that the previous problems were due to two out of the three disks
failing - the first failure not having been noticed.

You say "in Windows it is configured as one 70 Gb logical drive", usually
Raid5 is configured in the controller, and Windows sees it as one physical
drive.

Extending the current Raid5 by adding more drives is possible, but I guess
that on an older server you would have to destroy the existing array and
rebuild a new one on 4 or 5 disks. Same goes for replacing the existing 36
Gb disks by larger ones. It all depends on the chipset on the Raid
controller; the more modern ones can extend arrays by adding more disks
without having to rebuild from scratch, older ones only allow the addition
of "spare" drives which take over if one of the active drives fails.

To find out what options are available to you, search the compaq/hp sites
for the technical details on your Raid card (I suspect that it's an LC2).

Whatever you do remember to set up alerts in the Raid management software so
that you get a flag if a drives is failing. Whatever the Raid solution you
choose, if more than one disk fails you're stuffed (except for Raid 0+1
where 2 out of 4 can fail - if they are not a parallel pair).

It may be cheaper to buy a NAS rather than upgrade via a compaq/hp solution.

Cheers
 
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