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?

[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.

[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.

[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.