Changing from RAID 1 to RAID 5

to create the stripe set you will need empty spaces on your drives. it won't let you do it with a formatted partition...
however you can't have your system partition on a stripe set anyway, so you will have to have at least one partition outside the set...

Kurt, couple thoughts.
First, stripe sets with parity must be created from free space, not existing partitions.
Second, neither the boot partition (where the winnt directory is) nor the system partition (where boot.ini is in the root) (I know, MSnamed 'em backwards) can be members of a stripe set.
Third, the server must be rebooted after the creation of the stripe set w/ parity, in order to use it.

Bottom line - it will not destroy data on existing partitions, because you can't make it from an existing partition - must come from free space. As always, do a good backup first!!!!

See MS tech bulliten Q113933 for more info.

Good luck!
Chris C

Is this Software based or hardware? If software the other asnwers are correct.
If it is hardware based it depends on the controller. On Compaqs with the right controller you can pop in drives and change the raid configuration on the fly.

It makes a great deal of difference whether you are planning on implementing NT software RAID or will be using a hardware RAID controller.

With NT software RAID, your system partition will not be able to be part of the RAID group so your proposedplan would not work.

With hardware RAID, you could conceivably accomplish this but particularly with Exchange involved, I would be very, very cautious.

As an alternate procedure, you might want to consider creating a three-drive RAID array, migrating your Exchange databases to that array (use Exchange Optimizer)and then breaking the mirror and doing your tweaking of the system partition.

paul

Hi, you've heard that your choices are dependent on whether you have hardware or software RAID. Right now you have a mirror set AND you intend to add several new drives. Rather than break the mirror and make minor size tweaks to the system partition, why not keep it? Protect your boot files (system partition) with the mirror set and then make a raid 5 set from the drives you intend to add (minimum of three for raid 5). This gives you fault tolerance for system and boot partitions as well as RAID 5 fault tolerance. As you probably gleaned from the other responses, hardware RAID often is more flexible and reliable than software RAID (and considerably more expensive). Good luck.

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