(no subject)
Sep. 14th, 2011 08:05 am
Sep. 14th, 2011
Geek pop quiz.
Sep. 14th, 2011 11:34 amI'm looking at increasing the size of a Win7 machine's hard disk, without reinstalling the OS.
Difficulty: It's currently 3x500GB HW RAID-5, for a total of a 1TB disk that the OS thinks is a single disk.
2TB Disks are currently reasonably cheap - going to 3 of them for a "4TB" disk that the OS thinks is a single drive would be nice, but the problem is how to get there, from here.
If life were easy, I'd just swap one drive and sync, swap a second and sync, swap the third and the RAID controller would magically notice that hey it now has 3x2TB disks and would I like to expand the RAID size to match? But life isn't easy.
So: What's my best option, here? Set up a second RAID (I THINK I have three more ports on the RAID card...), mirror all the files across, boot from the second RAID, Bob's your uncle and handle the HDD size mismatch from inside the OS? Create a disk image on a spare disk, swap the RAID disks, pull the disk image back across? Give it up as lost, install Win7 on the new RAID, pull applications and settings across and "rejoice" in the opportunity to clean the thing out?
Difficulty: It's currently 3x500GB HW RAID-5, for a total of a 1TB disk that the OS thinks is a single disk.
2TB Disks are currently reasonably cheap - going to 3 of them for a "4TB" disk that the OS thinks is a single drive would be nice, but the problem is how to get there, from here.
If life were easy, I'd just swap one drive and sync, swap a second and sync, swap the third and the RAID controller would magically notice that hey it now has 3x2TB disks and would I like to expand the RAID size to match? But life isn't easy.
So: What's my best option, here? Set up a second RAID (I THINK I have three more ports on the RAID card...), mirror all the files across, boot from the second RAID, Bob's your uncle and handle the HDD size mismatch from inside the OS? Create a disk image on a spare disk, swap the RAID disks, pull the disk image back across? Give it up as lost, install Win7 on the new RAID, pull applications and settings across and "rejoice" in the opportunity to clean the thing out?
