I had two 300GB drives configured as a mirror array (RAID1) and recently bought two 1TB drives to replace them. I swapped out the first drive and let RAIDXpert rebuild the array, tested and then swapped out the second drive, again RAIDXpert rebuilt the array with no loss of data. Brilliant! But... in Windows 7 it shows the drive as still being 300GB. In the Disk Management I get the option to "Shrink Volume" but not to "Extend Volume". I suspect that the remaining 700G on the drives has not been formatted and therefore not recognised. This could be miles off but does anyone out there no how to remedy this? May be useful to know what I should have done for next time but really want to get out of this hole first.
In the partition manager, if it show unallocated space right click and go on create partition, you should then beable to extend the 300gb partition into that one. I've had a similiar problem before and i think thats how i did it, it was either that or a used a linux usb.
That's normal behaviour when rebuilding an array with larger drives, so don't worry - you didn't miss a step! Any decent partition manager software should be able to increase the partition size to fill the remaining space, just make sure you've got a backup of the data first.
Nothing wrong but still not working! tripwired. Thanks, It's comforting to know I wasn't way off mark but hasn't solved my problem I used to use Partition Magic but there are lost of warning not to use with Windows 7, so I haven't. I Windows 7's Disk Management seems to offer some of the partition capabilities but doesn't show that the RAID, or the Disks, are any bigger then 300 - so there is no way of asking it to extend the partition - even though this is an option, it's grey'd out. I downloaded and tried Partition Wizard Home Edition v5, it's free and has a few more features than the standard Windows. However this too doesn't see 1TB just the 300GB. So the same problem with extending the partition. AMD RaidXpert is the same. I started thinking I may have got confused and put the old disks back in, But the two old 300GB disks are right beside me and scrapping in the bin the packaging in both drive clearly say 1TB so I'm not going mad! By the way during boot up there is the option to "Ctrl+f" to enter the FastBuild utility but when I try the PC just skips past this and carries on merrily booting up.
It makes perfect sense that it remains 300gb. What i would do is make a new RAID1 with the 1TB drives and copy all the stuff over.
+1, though it's a bit late for that idea now I suppose. You can grow and shrink NTFS partitions, but I've found in the past that Linux makes a better tool for it than Windows. Have a Google around for methods that involve using an Ubuntu live CD or similar. (Alternatively, have a Google for alternative 'grow NTFS' software. ) Edit: either way you wind-up doing this, if you're going to mess about with the partitions and file systems, take one of your disks OUT of the computer. At least then if you screw it up, you have a backup. Similarly, you will want to make these changes to a single disk, check it's working as expected and then rebuild to the removed disk, from the corrected 1TB volume.
Are you using your motherboard's Raid controller? you may need to dive into your bios or raid software and expand the array first. if you've only got an array of 300GB defined, partition software will only ever see 300GB. For Raid controllers to do their job properly, they only ever present an array as a single disk to the OS, so to make the disk bigger, you have to make the array bigger.
WaRMadMax. I am using the motherboard Raid controller - your explanation sound right. Now have another problem when I press "Ctrl F" to enter RAID utility during start up - it simply skips by into the operating system?
