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Basic disk to dynamic after Clustered

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by fulcrum72

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I have a 2 node cluster running on W2K Advanced Server. The hardware on both nodes are IBM x330's, and the shared storage is an IBM EXP300. Cluster services has successfully been installed, and it can flip the cluster application from node to node without a problem.

The x330's have two internal hard drives, and on node1, the hard drives are mirrored (using W2K software mirroring). On node2, drive0 is a dynamic disk, while drive1 is a basic disk. I would like to mirror the disks as node one, but the system will not let me upgrade node2/drive1 to dynamic.

Any ideas on how to change node2/drive1 to dynamic, and therefore get mirroring working without reinstalling the whole thing?

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by ross.bale

You can convert a basic disk to a dynamic disk without having to reinstall - this is a one way move though.

Any MBR must contain at least 1Mb of space for the dynamic disk database - if this is not available, the conversion will fail. Do not convert a disk that contains multiple operating system installations.

System and boot partitions will only convert after restart - server could be down for a while.

If any of the following conditions occur, the conversion can fail after the computer restarts:
If you disconnect all existing dynamic disks while the computer is restarting.
If you replace a disk or set of disks to be converted while the computer is restarting. (Disk Management detects that the disk has changed and the conversion may fail.)
If you change the disk layout of a disk to be converted.
If the disk has I/O errors during the conversion.

In order to successfully convert a basic disk to a dynamic disk:

The disk must not be removable media. You cannot convert removable media devices to dynamic volumes. Removable media devices can contain only primary partitions.
The disk must not be in a portable computer. The sector size must be 512 bytes. Otherwise, you cannot convert a basic disk to a dynamic disk. You can use the chkdsk command to determine the disk's sector size.

Also, dynamic disks cannot be directly accessed by MS-DOS, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Millennium Edition, Windows NT, or Windows XP Home Edition

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