Geek pop quiz.

[theweaselking]

I'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?

Comments

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Is the RAID the boot drive?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Yes it is, or this would be very simple.

[skington.livejournal.com]

Can you boot from another (e.g. external thumb) drive temporarily?

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Yeah, i think that if you can boot from an external source, copy the RAID to the larger one, then make sure to copy the MBR (this is the key part, this won't copy over), it could work. But i've never attempted it.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, if you fail to copy the MBR but at least you partition the drive the way Win7 expects, you can do a "repair" installation from the Win7 DVD that will fix it all for you.

I'm a big fan of Win7's "I fucked up, fix it for me" features.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Shiny! Too bad they're going to fuck everything up with Win8, which is looking like Vista+Bob.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I suspect they're not going to fuck up the installer all that badly.

That being said, even numbered Windows releases are like Star Trek movies: You avoid them, and go for the odd-numbered Windows release/non-Star-Trek space movie instead.

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

8 improves the "I fucked it, fix it for me" with a really nice reset option that lifts up apps and data, rebuilds the OS and settings, and then puts them back. 5 minutes to rebuild a box.

I'm quite impressed with it so far, even more so when I put it on a non-touch machine and found the UI was actually really mouse friendly.

[maelorin]

if i weren't up to my eyes in thesis redrafting, i'd throw w8 on a box and have a play with it for myself.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Yes. That's not a problem.

Downtime on the machine is allowed. I just want fewest headaches during reinstall.

[fourgates.livejournal.com]

I'm of the opinion that rebuilding a system from scratch is the only safe protection against net cooties, and doing so annually is probably worth the effort. So I'm in favor of taking this opportunity to do so.

As an aside, I should note that changing your main drive along with the others may trip the Windows Genuine Headache detector. In my experience a simple call to their helpline will clear it up though.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Not an issue - replacing a HDD is explicitly allowed, the helpdesk call if the activation fails takes ~3min, and I've got a valid retail copy of Win7Pro for this machine so moving it from machine to machine is, outright, allowed.

[jerril]

I replaced EVERYTHING with a Home installation and it didn't even peep. Well, technically the old HDD was in the machine, but it wasn't where I was reinstalling to.

No clue why it didn't go 'boo'.

[andrewducker]

If you put in a 2TB disk and do a rebuild, does it partition off 500GB of the disk for use? If so you'll end up with three lots of 1500GB that can be turned into a second RAID drive.

Otherwise, I'd say it was worth a try mirroring across and booting from the new RAID, but you risk it not working.

How much software is installed? I'd be tempted to go with the "rejoice" option.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Software: three years worth of desktop + remote desktop + light server work. The big ones that worry me are the Steam apps, which will reinstall no problem but I don't want to *redownload* 450 GB of 'em, so saving the steamapps folder and getting Steam to re-recognise it would be nice.

[andrewducker]

That seems to be something they support fairly trivially nowadays:
https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=8794-YPHV-2033

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Oh hey, they've fixed that.

[nsanity-au.livejournal.com]

Just copy the SteamApps folder silly.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I suspect, for the record, I'm going to go with a full reinstall and a software RAID-1 from inside Win7, onto 2 x 2TB disks, to reduce noise, power consumption, and restore-from-failure annoyance factor, which still leaving RAID. But I haven't decided yet. I've also just now decided that fuckit, this can wait until Mid-October.

[andrewducker]

What I did was pick up a Synology DS411j, insert a few drives into it, and use that for anything I didn't mind having attached to the network.

And then just stick a single drive in my PC.

Now all of the movies, music, etc. is on that, and it can happily deal with upgrading hard drives without an issue. And stream to the 360/PS3 under the TV, and the music streamer in the kitchen, and any random laptop. Oh, and do my torrenting. And it sucks up a lot less power than my desktop does. So that's nice.

(This will almost certainly not suit your requirements. I'm just rambling.)

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

Use something like Acronis to clone the disk to a single 2TB drive, then create a new RAID disk using the clone as the seed drive.

[nsanity-au.livejournal.com]

Firstly...

3 Drive raid5? I want to slap you. Hard. Bad Weaselking, Bad. 5 drive minimum (its really just not worth the write penalties and rebuild times. Seriously)

Secondly.

What raid controller? is it something remotely decent? it may support OCE (online capacity expansion), this kinda fixes your problem.

ALSO

Booting > 2TB partitions requires a GPT Partitions, UEFI Bios, Windows 7 and some trickery.