How to shrink logical Drive on RS2BL040

[idata]

I made an inplace expansion of a productive raid-6 array, swapping 6x400 GB to 6x1 TB.

The reconstruction of the array succeeded without any issues, afterwards I had additional free space available.

Unfortunatly I decided to expand the existing virtual drive, resulting in a drive being greater than 2 TB in size.

The Server 2008 R2 OS on this box can not use more than 2 TB since this is the boot drive. There are 2 partitions, one for the os and one for the data, but of course this doesn't help.

I was searching for a command to reduce the size of the logical drive again, but I couldn'T find any possibility in the raid web console 2 v11.06.

Is there a way to reduce the size in the GUI?

if not: Is there a way to reduce the size in the CLI?

if not: Is there a way to reduce the size in the Raid-BIOS? I didn't risk any downtime yet, so I couldn't check.

If everything fails, I'll have to backup everything, recreate the virtual drives with correct size and restore the machine. Since this involves in moving 700 GB and having a long downtime I'D prefer something else....

thx

br

Gerhard

[Daniel_O_Intel]

None that I've ever seen, without using a third-party utility like Partition Magic. Are they still around?

[idata]

Thank for your answer, but you are on the wrong track. I'm talking about the logical drive being defined in the RS2BL040, not about a logical volume defined in the OS. Of course there are partition tools out there, but the 2 TB-limitation on the boot-drive is is an OS-limitation, so resizing the logical volume won't help, cause Server 2008 R2 can't boot afterwards....

I want to resize the logical drive. This can only be done controllerwise. The question is: can the RS2BL040 "shrink" a drive and generating thus "unassigned space".

thx

Gerhard

[idata]

Gerhard,

You cannot reduce the size of an existing virtual disk. You can adjust the size (from minimum to maxium available capacity) during the VD creation and expand after using online capacity expansion (OCE), but you cannot reduce the size of an existing virtual disk.

Regards,

John

[idata]

John,

thanks for the confirmation - the documentation on the rs2bl040 is a bit fussy on that topic.

br

Gerhard