RAID5 HDD upgrade from 6 x 2tb to 6 x 4tb HDD not showing up in windows

Hello Daniel,

Which raid controller do you have in your R710 server as you didn’t list it in your original post?

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Is this the correct info?

PERC H700 Integrated BIOS Configuration Utility 2.02-0025.1

Thank you for your time

Hello again, Daniel-

Since you are running RAID 5, I'll assume you are using an H700 card. Let me know if that's incorrect.

Forgive my silly questions, but are you trying to install Windows 2008r2 on this newly created volume or are you merely trying to make an existing installation recognize the volume(s)?

To put it another way, do you have Windows already installed on other storage on the server? IF that's the case, I would be curious to see if the Windows Device Manager shows the H700 card as recognized. IF it does, I would then look at your Disk Management to see if the storage is there, but is waiting for it to be brought online.

Hope my questions don't muddy the water too badly. :-)

Sean

Sean thanks for the reply. Apologies in delay reply.

Setup is 2 x 300gb HDD RAID1 existing installation OS = Disk 0

Upgraded from 2tb HDD to 4tb HDD = Disk 1

Windows Device Manager under Storage Controller recognises PERC H700 Integrated.

Within Disk Management, Disk 1 = 9312.38gb unallocated 681mb

Cheers

Dan

Evening,

Is anyone able to assist me with the above?

I had upgraded each HDD from 2tb to 4tb individually, so that all the information would copy across.
I am thinking that even though the HDDs show up as 4tb within the RAID PERC that the info copied across maybe the index of the old 2tb HDD is telling windows its still a 2tb HDD.

I am thinking that I might have to rebuild the server RAID 5. Before I do this any advice would be grateful before I start this journey.

TIA Daniel

Hi, Daniel-

If you are able to offload the exisiting data to temp space, I would recommend doing so. This would allow you to build a true 19 to 20TB (with the loss overhead and assuming RAID 5 over six 4TB drives) virtual disk. 

Once you have that built, then you can either slice off volumes in Windows from the newly created virtual disk. You're only caveat there is if you want Windows to see a 2TB or larger volume, you'll want to format it as GPT.

If you have existing data that cannot be offloaded during the rebuild, well, then that's kind of a pickle situation. :-)  While you'll be able to use the array, you'll never be able to increase the size presented to Windows without first creating a new virtual disk on the H700 card.

Hope that helps somewhat. :-)