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]

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.