Extend Partition

[tandy85]

We are running out of space on one of our drives.
We have an EMC SAN and we can extend the size of the filesystem. I think after you do that you can increase the size of the partition via Windows without any data loss or transfer. Seems like you can do it very quickly as well. We have a basic partition NTFS which is not the boot / OS partition. What do I need to do to add space to this drive and will I loose data? Thanks!!

 

[dberg35]

I rarely re-size a drive so the best solution would be add a new drive to the server if there is room.

 

[acl03]

Once you extend the size of your Logical Drive on the SAN, it should show up as "Unallocated Space" within Windows Drive Management.

The catch is (I think) that it has to appear to windows on the same physical drive, meaning the space you added would likely need to be on the same physical array as the drive you want to expand. If this is the case, you would see the unallocated space on the same horizontal bar as the drive you want to expand. Then you simply right-click the drive you want to expand, and choose Extend Partition (or something like that). This does happen instantly, though extpanding a SAN array can take hours or days, depending how big the current drive is.

PS. BACK UP YOUR DATA FIRST!!! You never know what will go wrong when you make changes to production systems.



Thanks,
Andrew

Hard work often pays off over time, but procrastination pays off right now!

 

[TonHu]

The EMC san should come with (software) tooling to do what you need. If you don't have access to those tools, then get the proper techs over to do the job for you, as this task is usually seen as advanced maintenance.

 

[StouseIT]

Windows 2003 has a utility to extend partitions called DiskPart. I have a Lefthand SAN and I have allocated more space on to logical drives mount from the SAN and then used the DiskPart to extend the volume

 

[acl03]

I believe the windows disk management GUI uses diskpart.exe as a backend. If you're comfortable with Command Line - you probably have more control that way.

http://www.eventid.net/display.asp?eventid=11&source=ql2300

Thanks,
Andrew

Hard work often pays off over time, but procrastination pays off right now!

 

[tandy85]

I am able to extend the disk via the SAN (it is EMC Celerra). I seem to recall in windows 2003 that you just use diskpart (as mentioned above) to extend it..piece of cake.. Has anyone done this? Also, can this be done while the drive has active IO? Thanks again.

 

[acl03]

I have done it with the GUI, which uses diskpart as a backend. It works fine while there is IO, well it did for me.

You can't extend a windows OS drive, though, but an additional data volume should be fine.

As I said before, back up your data first.

Thanks,
Andrew

Hard work often pays off over time, but procrastination pays off right now!

 

[technome]

Used 2003's Disk Manager to increase partitions, no issues.

Acronis or Paragon (and similar) can resize OS or data partitions. You need to shrink the data partition then increase the System partition, if there is no unallocated space on the drive or array.


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