Resize C Drive on Server

[dougp23]

Customer has an SBS2011 server. C drive is 50GB and it constantly fills up.
Is Partition Magic still around? GParted still maintained? I did some googling and the advice seemed to be "delete everything off of D, moving it to external drive (preserve permissions), then use built in Win disk mgr to expand c, then copy everything back on to D." Sounded like a lot could go wrong.

Interested in any of you have any workarounds. Looking for minimal downtime.

 

[backwoodsman]

GParted is still maintained and will do that very quickly and easily. There's a GParted live CD, but I usually use it via SystemRescueCD.
http://www.system-rescue-cd.org/

 

[backwoodsman]

I suppose a little more detail might be helpful.

If you want to minimize downtime, you'll want the partition next to C:, from which you'll take space to add to C:, to be empty. If there's data there, it'll work fine, but GParted will have to take a lot of time to shuffle it around before it shrinks that partition.

Other than whatever time that might take, it'll take only a few minutes to boot SystemRescueCD, take some space off that partition, and add it to C:. Then when Windows starts, it'll see that the size changed and force a check of the partition.

I've done this many times with GParted and never had a problem, but of course you want a good backup of anything being resized.

 

[AML]

+1 for GParted

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I've used Acronis Disk Director (server edition), and also used a similar product by Paragon. The "server" rated versions are pricey, but you pass that onto the client. If I'm working with a clients server, I want good immediate support behind a product, so I shoot for paid-tools that have the support. //insert the usual "Have a tested verified full server image backup before you begin" clause

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Yeah I have enough SBS installs out there I know right where to go to go chop down "bloat"...there are certain common directories and files on SBS where...if you managed enough, you'll get 'em memorized. And of course relocate certain services and standard folders to other volumes. But 50 gigs...yeah you'll be in there all the time trying to trim the fat. Gotta resize...I used to shoot for 127 gigs for system volumes on SBS.

 

[dougp23]

OK well I burned a CD of GParted and went to the customer site. Booted up with the CD, it's a Dell PowerEdge T310 server, prob 5 or 6 years old is my guess. Anyway, when GPart cameup, it recgnized the two HDs separately, instead of as one logical drive. So the C drive was on sda, and coudn't be enlarged at all. The D drive was on sdb, and could be resized, but didn't obviously do me much good.
I didn't want to mess around with Primary versus Extended and all that, but just wondering if I missed something. When the server boots, it does say two HDs are being used as 1 Logical Drive....

It was quite strange, because I could select between the two disks in the upper right. The first selection had nothing. The second selection had it all, with sda1 - 4, and sdb 1- (I forget).

 

[Sky-Knight]

Honestly, I'd replace the server. But you can get some space back by moving the exchange message store, and disabling / removing WSUS.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

This sounds horribly like RAID 0 - possibly the worst idea ever.

Or, hopefully, RAID 1. 2 hard drives can be striped (0), or mirrored (1).

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

If GParted could resize one of the physical drives but not the other then unfortunately it's probably not a mirror.

Eeeehhhh...not sure about that....I don't see how GParted would care of the diffy.

 

[mikeroq]

Can you show us a screenshot of disk management?

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Sorry, my fault - I forgot to quote this important bit:.

You didn't have to quote it, I saw it in original post. IMO, booted from gparted CD probably won't differentiate between seeing a pair of disks R0 or R1..esp if it's just software RAID or who knows what kind of onboard "fake raid" controller there is (soo...still mostly software). Based on this server appearing to be originally setup by an amateur, I'm doubting it's a higher end server with a proper dedicated hardware RAID controller (esp since one of those would present any disks in a RAID as volumes to some bootable CD).

 

[labtech]

I would recommend starting at physical level first. For JBOD, RAID0/1 there is a need of at least two hard drives. Are there two hard drives in the server? Can check via Device Manager for number of hard drives and their capacities. Then can start making sense of the formatted logical drive space and why something works or does not.
If only one hard drive is present, then you are dealing with two logical drives then.