1 Topic by autotalon

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Topic: Intel Raid question

Hello, I have a few Windows servers out there with single partitions, and I am looking to create data drives for them.  I got an identical machine and tested a resize on it, and it seemed to work and the machine booted afterwards OK, the only thing that I noticed was that the Intel raid had to rebuild itself.  Is there any issue with that?  I do have backups of those machines; the only reason I was concerned is that a restore could take 6 hours to do the whole drive so I wanted to see if anyone has used Gparted in this situation.  Thanks.

2 Reply by gedakc

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Re: Intel Raid question

I have an Intel Software Raid that I use for testing GParted.  With it I have been able to use GParted to successfully grow and shrink partitions of various types (NTFS, ext4).

What did you mean when you said the 'Intel raid had to rebuild itself'?

When resizing an partition containing an NTFS file system with GParted, the file system is marked as "dirty" so that when Windows boots up it will perform a chkdsk to ensure the file system is valid.  Is this what you saw?  If so this is normal.

What version of GParted or GParted Live are you using?

3 Reply by autotalon

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Re: Intel Raid question

gedakc wrote:

I have an Intel Software Raid that I use for testing GParted.  With it I have been able to use GParted to successfully grow and shrink partitions of various types (NTFS, ext4).

What did you mean when you said the 'Intel raid had to rebuild itself'?

When resizing an partition containing an NTFS file system with GParted, the file system is marked as "dirty" so that when Windows boots up it will perform a chkdsk to ensure the file system is valid.  Is this what you saw?  If so this is normal.

What version of GParted or GParted Live are you using?

I am using 0.29.0-1 of Gparted Live.  I dont recall it doing a chkdsk, what I am referring to is in the Raid BIOS as well as the manager software in the OS, the status goes to "Rebuild" after a resize and it seems to be rebuilding the array.  Once it does, it seems to be normal, and from what I can tell there does not appear to be data loss.  It is hard for me to tell as my test machine only has an operating system on it.

4 Reply by gedakc

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Re: Intel Raid question

There should be no rebuild of the RAID required.

What drive did you choose when you performed the resize?

With Intel Software RAID the drive path should be something like /dev/mapper/isw_jedagafcd_Vol0, and NOT LIKE /dev/sda.

5 Reply by autotalon (edited by autotalon 2017-09-08 23:08:05)

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Re: Intel Raid question

Ok had some time to boot it back up, when I boot up the USB into the desktop it gives an error about /dev/sda and sdb, which I can just cancel out.  In the main window itself it refers to the partitions as /dev/md126p1 through p5.  This is a 4 disk raid5 array.

6 Reply by gedakc

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Re: Intel Raid question

When you used GParted to partition the RAID, did you select device /dev/md126?

If a different drive was selected then that might explain the problem with the RAID.

7 Reply by autotalon (edited by autotalon 2017-09-12 22:03:48)

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Re: Intel Raid question

gedakc wrote:

When you used GParted to partition the RAID, did you select device /dev/md126?

If a different drive was selected then that might explain the problem with the RAID.

I did not use Gparted to initially create the partitions, these were created by the Windows installer when the OS was originally installed.

EDIT: For clarification, should I be creating the new partition I am making using Gparted?  Basically, the reason for this is that these are servers where the RAID was only set up with a single OS partition, and I am shrinking this and creating a separate data partition.

8 Reply by gedakc

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Re: Intel Raid question

It does not matter if Windows or GParted or some other partitioning tool created the original partitions.  All that matters is that the tool used to work with the partitions understands how to work with the partition table.  Note that older versions of Windows used an MSDOS partition table (also known as MBR), whereas newer versions use a GUID partition table (GPT).