Decrease spanned volume size ?

[David Balazic]

Hi!

Is there a way to decrease the size of a spanned volume ?
Actually I want to take out one "partition" from a spanned volume.

The spanned volume is made up from 3 partitions ( or whatever they are
called on dynamic disks ) on one disk nad one partition on another
disk. This one part is the only thing on the second disk ( it is
taking up all of the disks capacity ).
This piece on the second disk is the one I want to take out of the
spanned volume, so the disk would became free and I could install
another OS on it.

My current OS is Windows XP Professional.

I want to install an evaluation version of Windows 2003 server, but it
does not recognize the dynamic disk layout correctly and MS docs say
that two OS-es can't be on the same dynamic disk ( a stupid limitation
compared to classic basic disks IMO ). There is 5 GB of unused space
on the first disk, but as I said win2003 installer does not see it.
When I created a partition there in winXP, the win2003 installer
displayed some nonsense for the disks ( on first try, before I created
this partition, it displayed the winXP system volume and the spanned
data volume, but not the free space )

Help! What can I do ?
I looked at powerquests VolumeManager, but it does not run under
winXP.

Regards,
David Balazic

 

[Chris Lanier]

No, not in Windows. Third party software like Partition Magic might be able
to help.

 

[David Balazic]

No, not in Windows. Third party software like Partition Magic might be able
to help.

From the PartitionMagic README :

- PartitionMagic does not support volume sets, stripe sets, stripe
sets with parity, or partitions located on disk mirror/duplex
sets configured using Windows NT Disk Administrator. Under
Windows 2000/XP, PartitionMagic supports standard partitions
located on basic disk sets only.


[ snip ]

 

[David Balazic]

Come on, is there no solution ? :-(

 

[Kadaitcha Man]

Come on, is there no solution ? :-(

Backup.
Kill the volume.
Create a new one.
Restore from backup.

There, you have your solution.