Upgrading the Exchange Partition
I recently had a project to upgrade the data partition on an Exchange Server. Obviously being an email server, there is no room for error. We need to make sure that the server stays running while upgrading the space on the data drive.The server has a data drive (where the Exchange data is store) that was 120GB and is getting full. The idea was to make this drive bigger. The hardware setup was a RAID 5 with 3 hard drives, and room for 3 more.Expand your Logical Array
Basically, this depends on your raid controller. Most controllers nowadays have the option to expand your logical array using the new drives. All you do is put the hard drives in and add the 3 drives to the array (in my example I added two drives to the array and the 6th drive was setup as a hot spare).It may take a while for the controller to update, but once it is done the next step is to get Windows Server to recognize the new space.Windows Server 2003 – Extend Partition
Go to this web page from Microsoft.com, it is very exact and extremely simple.Good luck and leave a comment if you need some help…From Microsoft;
This article describes the following:
- How to use the Diskpart.exe command prompt utility to extend a data volume into unallocated space in Windows Server 2003, in Windows XP, and in Microsoft Windows 2000.
- How to extend the boot partition in Windows Server 2008.
