convert dynamic to basic in sbs 2003 (partition size problems)



I have inherited a sbs2003 with about 300mb free on the boot drive. It has
2 software mirrored scsii drives split into 3 drives. I badgered the boss to
get me server edition of paragon partition magic 7 as my understanding was
that I could move the partitions around and get myself out of a world of
hurt. So I have a test box at home with sbs2003 sp2 on it BUT it is raid 5
with 6 disks. to familiarize my self with the software (and my test box isn't
that important if I loose all the data) I have installed 7 server version on
it, I set the disks up as basic then converted to dynamic (as the original
set up at work was) now maybe I am dumb and shouldn't be in this job but
could someone please explain to me in words of less than 2 syllables how to
convert the dynamic discs back to basic, for the life of me I cant see how
to do it. Everything in the modify menu is menu is grayed out bar the view
sectors option. My only other options are retest surface, browse partition
and properties.

Any help in this would be gratefully received as I am pulling my hair out
and the management are starting to ask awkward questions which I am running
out of excuses to answer

After posting this on the paragon support forum - these articals were put
forward as a solution

http://faq.arstechnica.com/link.php?i=1806
http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/Library/2999d73d-4c49-45c6-96cb-ec6d7686317b1033.mspx?mfr=true


but I was kinda hoping I would be able to do this without having to nuke
everything and then reinstall from a backup.

Now Im guessing as these are software mirrors the other way I may be able to
do this would be to break the mirror - nuke drive 1 / convert it back to
basic - create new appropriate size partitions and then clone the dynamic
partitions to the basic ones, what software would do this on sbs2003 ?? - I
dont think regular ghost would do this - and I cant see the boss forking out
for enterprise version.

I have nuked my test box - reinstalled sbs and left disks as basic - and the
program is quite handy and worth the money (for people who hadnt quite
thought out their partition sizes) - still leaves me with the issue of
dynamic disks at work though


Any ideas ??

TIA

Kev K



.



Relevant Pages

  • Re: RAID & /boot
    ... First, although GRUB can't boot from a RAID partition, LILO can. ... Second, Linux does RAID on partitions, not whole disks. ... so you should probably plan to plug in an extra IDE controller card. ... Sometimes Linux tries to shuffle the /dev names for the drives when ...
    (alt.os.linux.suse)
  • Re: How to Expand HDD on SBS 2003 SP2
    ... Upgrading the disks to larger disks. ... I used various Imaging software to grab images onto an external HDD but had no end of issues with the software either not seeing the drives at all or supposedly successfully re-imaging - and at the same time re-sizing the partitions - only to be non bootable. ... This also gave me the opportunity to create a better partition structure that I could move the data files to later as well. ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs)
  • Re: external USB drive
    ... There was definitely a problem with early builds of os2dasd.dmd and possibly other files that affected large disks but the fix for that has been in for a long time. ... I do remember others posting of problems with USB attached large drives though and I am not sure if there was a solution to it. ... These variables are part of the OS/2 ... And, most importantly, you need to boot OS/2 with an empty partition ...
    (comp.os.os2.misc)
  • Re: What to do about the 2TB limit on HDIO_GETGEO ?
    ... > sector offset of a hard disk partition. ... I believe GUID Partition Tables (GPTs) are the answer. ... Windows VISTA 64-bit supports GPTs on data disks and new Mac OS based ... systems have been using it on internal drives for a couple years at ...
    (Linux-Kernel)
  • Re: Dual Boot Instructions
    ... If "drive" means a single partition or logical drive, then the negatives you've heard are very true. ... But if "drive" means a physical hard disk drive, then I'm in big trouble because I have SIX versions of Windows installed on my 1 TB Disk 1, my second HDD! ... The name stuck when we added hard disk drives, ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.vista.hardware_devices)

Loading