Can't enlarge partition after migrating raid volume to larger drives

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I have a Dell Dimension e310 that originally had two 80GB drives in a mirror RAID configuration. It uses Intel Matrix Storage Console to administer the RAID.

The 80 GB drive was full. In order to add space, I pulled one drive and replaced it with a 1TB Seagate Drive. The RAID software detected the new drive and rebuilt the image on the new drive, with the 80 GB partition size. I then pulled the other drive and the RAID software did the same thing. So now I have two 1 TB drives in the RAID.

The partition however is still the old size. I was hoping that Acronis Disk Director would let me expand the old partition up to the 1 TB size. However when I run Acronis, it only lists unallocated space as 7 MB, not the over 900 GB it should be. Why doesn't Acronis see the full size of the hard drive? The C drive volume is listed as "Primary MBR" and is NTSF, if that helps. The operating system is Windows XP SP3.

Thanks for your help,

Rob

Thu, 08/23/2012 - 20:35
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I think that's because the RAID size is already set at the previous limit from when you replaced the drive (this information is saved on the RAID drives). You may need to break the RAID and reconfigure it to use the entire drive's space. You might check if the Intel program will let you expand the RAID partition.

To be safe, create a backup image of the entire RAID drive before trying anything.

Fri, 08/24/2012 - 15:17
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Thanks for the advice. I went and broke the raid. The good news was that when I put the new drive in, Acronis saw it and showed the 900 gb of unallocated space. The bad news was that unless one of the old drives was still hooked up, the computer would blue screen when Windows tried to load. It would boot from the new 1tb drive, but only if the old 80gb drive was in the other SATA slot. If I tried it with both new drives in, or only one new drive hooked up, Windows would not boot.

I started to get concerned that while I theoretically had three backups of the original drive, if I keep messing around I will end up with no drives that boot. I acknowledge that I definitely do not know what I am doing when it comes to managing the RAID controller.

Rob

Sat, 08/25/2012 - 20:27
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You probably just need to install the AHCI driver. I think you should be able to do that when booted to the new drive. Once that driver is installed it should boot up out of RAID mode.

What mode is the BIOS using when you boot with the 1TB drive and the 80GB drive?

Sat, 08/25/2012 - 21:17