Argh, found out yesterday I've managed to paint myself in to a corner...
Basically when we received the new servers a few months ago when I was setting them up I found that you couldn't boot from a drive of more than 2TB. No problem, I created two virtual disks (Dells terminology) one an 80Gb RAID5 for the OS and a 7TB RAID5 for the Data.
The server has since been setup with DPM2010 which has managed to consume almost the whole 7TB so I needed to add more.
I've added a new 2TB drive, but I can't expand the array to include it! Turns out if you have more than one Virtual Disk on a controller you cannot expand the disks.
Now I'm stuck. I can't lose the 7TB of data as it's taken months to build up!
I thought perhaps I could backup the 80Gb virtual disk, then:
Delete the 80Gb virtual disk
Expand the 7TB Virtual Disk to fill the space
Create an 80Gb partition in the unallocated space
Restore Windows 2008 R2 to it
Repair any boot errors and good to go!
BUT I can't because you can't BIOS boot from a drive larger than 2TB! I can switch it to UEFI but then you need to reinstall Windows 2008 R2 as it won't see the change except during the initial installation.
Don't suppose anyone else has found themselves in this situation and resolved it?
Most annoying is I have 13 other servers I've built and deployed all the with the same issue waiting to be a problem...
Basically when we received the new servers a few months ago when I was setting them up I found that you couldn't boot from a drive of more than 2TB. No problem, I created two virtual disks (Dells terminology) one an 80Gb RAID5 for the OS and a 7TB RAID5 for the Data.
The server has since been setup with DPM2010 which has managed to consume almost the whole 7TB so I needed to add more.
I've added a new 2TB drive, but I can't expand the array to include it! Turns out if you have more than one Virtual Disk on a controller you cannot expand the disks.
Now I'm stuck. I can't lose the 7TB of data as it's taken months to build up!
I thought perhaps I could backup the 80Gb virtual disk, then:
Delete the 80Gb virtual disk
Expand the 7TB Virtual Disk to fill the space
Create an 80Gb partition in the unallocated space
Restore Windows 2008 R2 to it
Repair any boot errors and good to go!
BUT I can't because you can't BIOS boot from a drive larger than 2TB! I can switch it to UEFI but then you need to reinstall Windows 2008 R2 as it won't see the change except during the initial installation.
Don't suppose anyone else has found themselves in this situation and resolved it?
Most annoying is I have 13 other servers I've built and deployed all the with the same issue waiting to be a problem...