Dell Power Edge 2500 and Perc2

[ITLady]

Help!!!!

I am trying to re-config or partition my server. My operating system is Microsoft Small Business Server. Right now it is configured with a Perc controller with 3 18 gb hard drives. The drives are set up as "Stripe" sets in the Perc configuration. According to the instructions by Dell, I can re-configure the size using the disk management under Windows Administration. Here is what the disk manager shows as my allocation:

Disk 0
Basic 50.84 GB
Online

32MB_UP
31MB_Fat
Healthy (EISA Configuration)

SBS_Drive(C
9.27 NTFS
Healty (System)

41.51 GB
Free Space

DOS
31MB_FAT
Healthy

I created the dos partition and loaded Paragon Hard Disk Manager 5.5 in an attempt to expand my "C" drive to at least 20GB. When I boot the server using a DOS boot disk then open the Hard Disk Manager. I get an "Invalid code page file" when I open the program and when I try to convert the "C" drive to FAT32 so I can re-size per Paragon instruction with no luck. I also tried to do this in the windows version of the program also but no luck either. I am wondering if the stripe configuration of the drives is causing limitations and maybe a RAID solution would be better? I am a little fuzzy on the capabilities of using RAID over stripe. What I have read on it that the stripe configuration would suffice. This server will be handling all email, Internet, SQL functionality for the company. I have loaded the Small Business Server but can do a reload if necessary.

Thanks for ANY Help!!

 

[BoredK]

The current config won't give you any redundancy, if one drive fails everything is lost. If you reconfigure to RAID5 which gives you redundancy, you'll have to reinstall. In that case you can choose the partitionsize you want (you'll have 33.9 G of space). Otherwise, DOS utilities should be able to access drives configured through a RAID controller. If they don't, consult the software man.

 

[NickFerrar]

I'd wipe it and start again

Create a RAID5 container for the entire disk space using the card BIOS (during boot up when the PERC controller is detected you'll get an option to go into it's configuration).

Once that's done install Windows 2000 Server and select between a 4 and 8GB C: partition (we generally stick with 4GB if ARCserve isn't running on it or go to 8GB if ARCserve is running - as it's creates a lot of logs). Make sure you format it as NTFS.

Once Windows 2000 Server is installed just go to disk manager and configure the remaining free space how you want (we always only use one additional partition, i.e. a D: partition) and configure this as NTFS to.

Once the other basics are done install SBS to the D: partition.