On 8 Jul 2010, at 14:52, James Bensley wrote: > ... > I am wanting to alter the partition sizes of a Windows Server 2003 box > we have and I was planning to boot up with a GParted Live CD but will > it be able to see my NTFS partitions to resize them? > > The box in question is a PE1950 with a Perc 5/i with two SATAII drives > in a hardware RAID1, on that sits two Logical Volumes, ignore volume > 1; on volume 0 there are two partitions C: and P: and I want to shrink > P: and then grow C: but does anyone know if Gparted can see NTFS > partitions, on a LV, on the hardware RAID on a Perc 5/i? Seems a bit > far fetched to me?
I've done this on a PowerEdge 2800, with a Perc4, I think. Chances are the the Linux LiveCD will recognise the RAID controller and see the logical volumes as sda, sdb &c. As per Timo's reply, which has arrived before I'm able to finish typing. If your first choice of LiveCD doesn't work, try a couple of recent Knoppix CDs, System Rescue CD &c. See some hints in this post: http://gparted-forum.surf4.info/viewtopic.php?id=13903 I advise you to take backups of the Windows system before you start. Of all drives / LVs / partitions. IMO the best way is just to dd all logical drives of=/mnt/whatever/file.img to a couple of external USB hard-drives. This requires overnight operations or long downtime, but GParted is not warrantied. You may be able to shrink the P: partition from within Windows 2003, using Management > Disks &c. If you have this option I advise you to do so. If you need to move the start point of P: using GParted I advise you to do so and reboot into Windows before tacking the resize of the C: drive. I believe the C: partition in Server 2003 presents some special difficulties. I believe that after making the enlargement using GParted (and after applying those changes), but *before rebooting to Windows* you need to then shrink it again to make Windows recognise the changes. You only need to shrink it very slightly - i.e. enlarge from 10gig to 20gig, then reduce the partition size by 100meg - but this is necessary to make GParted work correctly on Server 2003 C: drives. Otherwise the partition will be seen as larger in Computer Management > Disk Management, but not in Windows Explorer, which will show it at its original size. There are lots of documented instances of this phenomenon all over the GParted forums and elsewhere. The two resizes need to be applied separately in such a way that separate actual operations are performed by GParted. I think that after you have made the two resizes and reboot to Windows, chkdsk will be triggered automatically at first boot. So your comment - "seems a bit far fetched to me?" - no, not at all. The LVs are a standard feature on this RAID card, which is (surely) supported under Linux. NTFS and multiple partitions are both supported by GParted. The problem is that it's all a little bit fiddly, and one has to be cautious. This is certainly not as quick and easy as using Partition Magic on an XP Home PC. I took multiple attempts performing this operation, imaged backups of the drives each step of the way, and it took me quite a lot of time. Valuing my time at £50 per hour (charged to the client) it would probably have been cheaper to buy a proprietary partitioning utility for Windows Server - I think there was one (the server version of Partition Magic?) that seemed like it would do the job for about £200. The C: partition on Server 2003 is a bit special, though, so I'm not sure that all proprietary partitioning utilities handle it. My conclusion was that having multiple LVs on a single array is a bit shit - if you can afford that rackspace you're better of using extra drives, and IMO a separate array per partition (I just don't generally bother much with partitions). But that's tangental to your question. Stroller. _______________________________________________ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list [email protected] https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
