Dynamic Disk Advice Needed!

[skc]

We have a client machine on the network running Windows
2000 Server but not as domain controller. The network is
a SBS2000 one.

The client is a Dell PowerEdge 2400 (Dual-PIII with 1536MB
RAM) with a RAID-5 disk array consisting of x5 36GB SCSI
in RAID-5 with a HotSpare in bay 6. The RAID-5 array is
Dynamic through Disk Manager (we use Dell OpenManage Array
Manager) with a C Drive partition of 8GB and data
drives/volumes called N,P,Q,T each dynamic with
unallocated space we can assign to N,P,Q and T - should we
need to increase the partition sizes.

The questions are as follows:

1. The user recently had his C Drive Free space reduced to
just a few MB. So he moved his pagefile.sys from C Drive
to Q Drive. This released around 2GB of space from C
Drive. What risk is there of moving pagefile.sys from C
Drive to a data drive called Q? Q now has in the root
pagefile.sys of 2.5GB.

2. When the swap file was moved, this was set using an
initial size of 2500MB and a maximum size of 4095MB. We
tried entering 4096MB as the max size (which we are sure
that we had seen there before), but a pop-up dialogue box
requested us to set this to 4095 - which seems quite a
strange number. Why is this?

3. The user wants to increase his C Drive partition by
assigning some Unallocated space to C. Is this a good
thing to do? Please can someone tell me whether this is
OK - as the user wants a lot more free space in C - the
only way possible is to assign more to C. In actual fact,
I seem to recall the user trying to assign more MB to C
Drive - but could not - is this true? In which case, how
can we allocate more space to C by making use of the
Unallocated space?

If someone could kindly answer the questions above this
would be most appreciated.

Skc

 

[Bjorn Landemoo]

Skc

1. In order to create a full memory dump, a page file on the boot partition
is needed. If you really need a dump, it is possible to use the MAXMEM
switch in boot.ini to use less RAM, and thus a smaller page file, just to
get the dump.

2. 4095 is less than 4GB, even with only a MB, but 4GB is too much. You can
circumvent the limit, this MS Knowledge Base tells you how:

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=237740

3. There is currently no supported way of increasing the size of the boot
or system volume on a dynamic disk without a backup and restore.

Best regards

Bjorn

 

[Leonard Severt [MSFT]]

We have a client machine on the network running Windows
2000 Server but not as domain controller. The network is
a SBS2000 one.

The client is a Dell PowerEdge 2400 (Dual-PIII with 1536MB
RAM) with a RAID-5 disk array consisting of x5 36GB SCSI
in RAID-5 with a HotSpare in bay 6. The RAID-5 array is
Dynamic through Disk Manager (we use Dell OpenManage Array
Manager) with a C Drive partition of 8GB and data
drives/volumes called N,P,Q,T each dynamic with
unallocated space we can assign to N,P,Q and T - should we
need to increase the partition sizes.

The questions are as follows:

1. The user recently had his C Drive Free space reduced to
just a few MB. So he moved his pagefile.sys from C Drive
to Q Drive. This released around 2GB of space from C
Drive. What risk is there of moving pagefile.sys from C
Drive to a data drive called Q? Q now has in the root
pagefile.sys of 2.5GB.

2. When the swap file was moved, this was set using an
initial size of 2500MB and a maximum size of 4095MB. We
tried entering 4096MB as the max size (which we are sure
that we had seen there before), but a pop-up dialogue box
requested us to set this to 4095 - which seems quite a
strange number. Why is this?

3. The user wants to increase his C Drive partition by
assigning some Unallocated space to C. Is this a good
thing to do? Please can someone tell me whether this is
OK - as the user wants a lot more free space in C - the
only way possible is to assign more to C. In actual fact,
I seem to recall the user trying to assign more MB to C
Drive - but could not - is this true? In which case, how
can we allocate more space to C by making use of the
Unallocated space?

If someone could kindly answer the questions above this
would be most appreciated.

Skc

Let me try to answer your questions.

No problem with page file on any drive. If fact can get performance
increase with it on other drives.

Don't know why 4095 as 4096 is maximum size. I would not worry about it
though.

You will not be able to extend C without using 3rd party utility. Why
are all the drives dynamic? Do not make drives dynamic unless they need
to be.

Leonard Severt

Windows 2000 Server Setup Team