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partition problems.

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Lordmathos

IS-IT--Management
Oct 21, 2005
243
GB
Hi we are having partition space issues on one of our servers.

Basically when the server was originally configured the os (c:) partition was made too small and now it has 0 bytes free. There is about 64gb free on the data (d:) partition. The drives are on a raid 5 configuration running server 2003.

Is there anyway I can take some of the free space from the d: partition and extend the c: partition without losing any data.

Cheers

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.
 
SOrry what I ment to ask was if there is any software out there that will do this

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.
 
yeah there are several.

the most well known back in the day was 'Partition Magic', it is a commercial software the costs. there are Open Source alternatives that are freely available (one is called QTParted- the software allows you to resize partitions on a physical drive while keeping the data on all partitions intact) ----- but either way youd better make a complete image backup of both partitions before you do anything because there is a very real possibility that you might end up destroying one or both partitions.

programs that resize partitions are dangerous. don't get me wrong, ive done it many times before and i dont think ive ever once actually lost data, but it very very very well can happen and youd better have a full backup before you do anything.

if i could recommend two products to you- neither of them are open source or free but you can get both, together, for under 100$.

Acronis Disk Director --- this self bootable CD will allow you to resize and do all sorts of other nifty things to partitions. before using it, use:

Acronis True Image --- this self bootable CD will allow you to make a complete image of all partitions or physical drives (including boot sectors) to an image file that you can save to a separate RAID array or external USB drive. if you actually install the program in windows, you can even open the drive image and pull out individual files instead of just restoring the image to a drive.

i cannot give any better recommendation. in the past i had the same problem you are having now- my main boot partition was out of space. i had set up another raid array in the server but i needed to move all of the data from the old ~70Gig raid array to the new ~160Gig raid array. Ghost failed to do this. It would lock up about halfway through, I tried several different versions of Ghost but perhaps they just didnt like the PERC4/Di raid controller. either way, I bought Acronis and it went through perfectly fine, in very little time. it ran so fast, in fact, that i left the other raid array in the server so that I could use it as a place to make full backup images of the server from RAID to RAID every month just to be on the safe side (the size of the image file that Acronis creates is significantly smaller than the data it images, which is nice).

hope this helps.
 
Before resizing have you looked to see what is using up all the space? Download treesize free and scan the drive it will show you the size of all the files.
 
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