1 Topic by kmh72756 (edited by kmh72756 2008-06-22 06:59:23)

  • kmh72756
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Topic: post-success questions

I really want to thank everyone involved for the chance to use Gparted-LiveCD.

I had the benefit of knowing that I had a complete drive image backup before doing anything.
Otherwise I wouldn't have just followed my instincts and bulled forward.
Anyway, everything worked out great but after the fact I want to understand exactly why I seem to have been lucky and had everything go so well.

Hardware:
ASUS P5K motherboard
Intel P35-ICH9R
Intel Q9450 Core 2 Quad 2.66GHz 12mb Cache 1333 FSB
4Gb memory
Southbridge 4xSATA 3 Gb/s ports
JMicron JMB363 PATA/SATA controller
2 Seagate ST3160815AS 160Gb SATA-2 7200rpm 8mb Cache
nVidia 8400GS

Software:
Windows XP Pro SP3

I had the entire RAID as 1 volume with a single partition with about 70Gb free.
I needed Gparted to shrink the C drive down to about 100Gb so I could have a new D drive of about 50Gb.

I downloaded, burned and booted the latest stable version 0.3.6-7 but after too may attempts to find the right combination of startup choices, I was still getting tons of Linux startup messages but always ending up with a command prompt and no graphical interface.
After reading a lot of messages here in the forum, I eventually went back to old version 0.3.1-1 and was pleasantly surprised to finally get the Gparted screens.

The only problem was that I could see the 2 drives as individual items.
This is where I closed my eyes and went ahead and shrunk the partitions on both drives by the same amount and created a 50Gb partition on each.
Starting XP only paused to do a chkdsk after which I have exactly what I wanted and both partitions for C and D seem to be functioning in correct RAID 1 mode.

First question
From reading more messages here, I think the current version appears to have enough options to have done the shrinkage of a RAID setup if I could have just found the right combination of parameters.  Some older message even say things like 'RAID is not supported'.  Is this true?
And is there any plan to make all of those options any more automatic or more clear choices?

Second question
Why did the old version work correctly even if it didn't support RAID setups?
How did Gparted even see the two drives as separate items when I thought RAID hardware hides the physical drives from the system side of the controller.
Was I really just lucky?

Thanks in advance for any insights.  I really know I should understand what happened.

2 Reply by class413

  • class413
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Re: post-success questions

RAID is generally supported since long. There are perhaps sometimes some problems like anything in the computer world.
Latest version is 0.3.7-5. There were many cases with 0.3.7-2 and 0.3.7-5 working while older versions didn't. Testing version doesn't mean experimental. I think you could try them out before going back to the past smile

About 0.3.1-1, I think you went too much back in the time. There are  many successful versions in the series 0.3.4-x. I personally went back to 0.3.4-11 to resize the partition on a new seagate freeagent 750 pro external hard drive, because 0.3.7-x didn't detect it. I had no 0.3.6-5 CD nearby to try, so I used 0.3.4-11 successfully.


About the RAID question: It is not surprising that GParted saw the 2 drives. It would be perhaps more surprising for me that the resulting resized drives worked with no problem after. Anyway I'm not a RAID expert. Perhaps it is due to the fact that in RAID1 the 2 drives are exactly mirrored. 2 identical drives (hardware and content) were resized exactly the same manner, so the resulting drives were identical too.
I think the motherboard BIOS contains a command menu that permits to fix a RAID 1 in case one of the drives is replaced. So you could eventually resize just one of the drives and recreate the second drive from the good one. Of course this is just a thought, I wouldn't suggest it without a prior backup.

I'm afraid this wouldn't be possible in the case of RAID 0. RAID 1 contains 2 identical consistent file systems. In RAID 1 the contents is distributed over the 2 drives.

(Topic moved to the Live Media section)

*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***