RAID 5 and Partition Size C/D

[popotech]

we are currently using a dell poweredge 2650 at our building,i think we are running RAID 5 on two hdd's (don't know if there is a way to tell). our problem is that we have two drives c and d, the two drives are both 36gb, our problem is that our c drive is running our of room and i didn't know if i would be able to insert another 36gb drive (three slots open) on the machine to add another 36 gb and add that to the c partition? is this possible. thanks in advance.

 

[captaincrunch00]

It is possible, you'll have to go to disk management to do that, and your C: has to be a dynamic disk already, if it is basic then you might be in trouble.

To check:
Right click My Computer->Manage
Disk Management is down bottom, check to see if it says Basic or Dynamic disk on the left of the C drive.

 

[Roadki11]

Cant run Raid5 on 2 hdd's so i think you can rule that out. Dells run a perc raid controller if you even have one in the box i dont know. you can tell by booting the system, you should see a scsi perc bios post at some point if you have one. Usually have to hit a ctrl+G or ctrl+C or something like that to get into the raid card setup. anyway if you dont have a raid card you will have to go with the info captaincrunch provided.

RoadKi11

 

[popotech]

captaincruch,
when i go to disk management and select "Disks" and then select "Disk 0 (Virtual Disk 0) and in the far right window pain under the general tab next to "C" the type is basic, why do i get the feeling that that sucks bad?

 

[captaincrunch00]

You might be able to right click it and make it a dynamic disk, but ask someone smarter than me about that.

I had a slight incident with my NAS the other day. I was half asleep or something and I broke the OS drive mirroring between disks 1 and 4, and now I cant get it to mirror to anywhere else.

 

[pgaliardo]

Roadkki11 is correct. With 2 disks, it is not a raid 5. If it is fault tolerant, it is probably a mirror. If it is, I don't think you can just add a 3rd disk and extend the C.
You can convert a basic disk to dynamic, but I try to avoid fooling with that, especially on the C drive.

I think the safest way for you to do this is to add new drives and create a new partition from these drives. Then clean up the C drive and move anything you can to the new partition. Maybe you have a page file on C that you can move, etc. 36GB seems plenty big for a C drive. You should be able to move something.