Breaking a Mirrored drive

Tonym56 · 21st April 2008

I currently havce a mirrored drive, Win Server 2003 SP2. The C:\ is full. I have 130GB on an unallocated partition of the Raid 1 (mirrored) drive, How can I extend the C:\ to the unallocated partition. I considered breaking the mirror, yet read the following: Never break a healthy system disk or boot dynamic mirrored volume and expect the mirrored drive to replace the original primary drive if it fails. The manually broken mirrored drive is assigned the next available drive letter, and this is updated to the permanent record in the LDM database. This means that regardless of what position that drive takes in the boot process, it is assigned the new (and incorrect) drive letter, so the operating system cannot function correctly.
Can this be done, or is it better to wipe out the OS & start all over?

mflynn · 21st April 2008

Need more details!

But your description of the process is correct.

I ADVISE YOU GET TWO BACKUPS FROM TWO DIFFERENT BACKUP PROGRAMS SO YOU CAN BE ABSOLUTLY CERTAIN YOU CAN REBUILD IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What I don't understand is.

What do you mean by extenting it?

If you have RAID then you have drives of equal or more drive space.

Do you have unalloted space on both drives??

You surely cannot "extend" into the other drive while it is the secondary RAID target.

In fact you can not extend all unless you ahave matching free space on both drives.

I would think you backup and replace the drives with larger ones then rebuild the RAID and then restore the backup.

Mike

**ReggieB** · 22nd April 2008

How big is the C: partition?

If this is a file server, it is my experience that it is much easier to add a new partition (either using existing spare space on the disk - or on a new disk) and then copy the shared folder to the new space. Then switch off file sharing for the old folder and share the new folder. You can then delete the old folder after you are sure the new system is working (I usually leave the deletion for a week or two if I can).

The key point with network file sharing is that the share path doesn't care where the file is located:

Code:

c:\shared_folder  -----> \\server_name\shared_folder
d:\shared_folder  -----> \\server_name\shared_folder
e:\some_folder\shared_folder -----> \\server_name\shared_folder

In most cases, it far easier and less likely to drop you in the doo-dah if you move stuff to a new partition rather than try to modify an existing partition.

Tonym56 · 12th May 2008

The Mirrored drive has over 100GB of Unallocated space. Maybe my verbage was incorrect. I want to be able to use that additional space for my C:\. The box is just a File Server. I'm not running any applications on it, just a place for my users to store their files, which is on a seperate drive (I call L:\) so deleting the mirror & starting over my users will not lose any of their work. I'll just have the down time until I get mor space on my C:\ for the OS. Win Server 2003.

Quote:

Originally Posted by mflynn

Need more details!

But your description of the process is correct.

I ADVISE YOU GET TWO BACKUPS FROM TWO DIFFERENT BACKUP PROGRAMS SO YOU CAN BE ABSOLUTLY CERTAIN YOU CAN REBUILD IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What I don't understand is.

What do you mean by extenting it?

If you have RAID then you have drives of equal or more drive space.

Do you have unalloted space on both drives??

You surely cannot "extend" into the other drive while it is the secondary RAID target.

In fact you can not extend all unless you ahave matching free space on both drives.

I would think you backup and replace the drives with larger ones then rebuild the RAID and then restore the backup.

Mike