How are you going to backup that Uber-Partition? I have an SBS2011E R710 which has 4Tb on one of the partitions. We did not make any of the volumes larger that 2Tb so backup and restores would work natively. You should be able to just add Volumes in Disk Management.
You could backup the server and re-create the virtual drives to 1Tb for OS and the rest for a GPT partition. But this is SBS - think about recovery of the drives if anything goes wrong. For my client with 6Tb on the server we backup different volumes to different places in rotation so if the server is down then there is very little impact. Rebuilding all that data on a server would take weeks. We use iSCSI partitions on NAS boxes to perform backup across the network and we keep a backup of the OS on a data stick. If you do want all that space addressable as a single drive (so the boss can right click and see 5Tb free) then you could always create 3 Tb drives and create mount points to appear as a single drive. Mike -----Original Message----- From: James R. Costa, MCP [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 10 February 2013 19:22 To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: SBS2011 cannot allocate very large disk Hi all, I'm dealing with a SBS2011 server with a lot of disk space and I wanted to get some feedback from you. This Dell R710 server has 6x 2TB (5+1HS) in RAID-5 and is up and running live. However when it was installed, the array was configured as a single 7.4TB disk, and Windows was installed as 2x 1TB simple MBR partitions on that large disk, leaving roughly 5+TB unallocated. I guess the idea was to allocate it later? Right... anyway as I'm sure you know, MBR cannot address space larger than 2.1TB, and BIOS cannot address GPT partitions as bootable. Now this particular server supports booting from UEFI to a GPT partition as an option. My question, have any of you dealt with this before? Something like an MBR-to-GPT conversion, modify the BIOS to boot to UEFI instead, and then partition the unallocated space. Sounds like some UEFI-related Server 2008 patches would need to be installed as well. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/975535 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/979374 I'd like to avoid a lengthy backup/rebuild if possible because this server is live. Looking for any feedback you could provide. Thank you gentlemen-- Best Regards, James ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
