Expanding the C Drive Partition

[Ben Turner]

ENVIRONMENT
I inherited an Windows 2000 server which is the only Active Directory Domain
Controller in the environment. This machine is also running Exchange Server
2000. It has a RAID 5 configuration with 6 hard drives and the container has
room for 2 more hard drives. There are 2 partitions on these drives; the C
Drive with a 4.0 GB partition and the E Drive with a 46.0 GB partition. The
C: drive has 650 MB free and the E: Drive has just over 10 GB free. The
Exchange Information Store is located on the E: Drive.

PROBLEM
When the C: drive partition starts to fill up with TMP files and the free
space reduces the Exchange services begin to stop running, forcing me to
clean the up the TMP files to free up some space.

QUESTION
How can I safely add additional space to the C: Drive Partition without
having to rebuild the machine. Is there a way to do this. Can I add another
hard drive and allocate this space to the C: Drive Partition?

Any help is appreciated.

 

[Steve Duff [MVP]]

Have you tried simply mapping the swap file and
temp folder to your large partition? 4GB isn't a lot
(sounds like an NT upgrade), but it should be enough
if you work things right.

Whether you can expand the C partition easily
depends partly on whether your RAID controller
supports on-line expansion (aka OLCE) This is the
"safest" and most straightforward way.

If not, you could add two separate, mirrored drives,
image over to them, and boot from that. The process is
much more straightforward if you have something like
Paragon's Partition Manager to do the heavy lifting.

You also can use partitioning utilities to simply shrink the data partition,
move it to the end, and then expand the boot partition. As this can be very
very time-consuming, and I usually just backup data twice and then
blow off the data partition, restoring it after expanding the boot drive.

Let me warn you: even experienced admins find the
waters getting deep very fast when trying to shuffle in
a new boot partition. It is very, very easy to hose your
system if you boot with the wrong setup.

So before attempting anything along these lines always make
sure you have a workable plan -- and a backup plan -- to restore
from ground-zero if it comes to that. It sometimes does.

Steve Duff, MCSE
Ergodic Systems, Inc.

 

[Andy]

ENVIRONMENT
I inherited an Windows 2000 server which is the only Active Directory Domain
Controller in the environment. This machine is also running Exchange Server
2000. It has a RAID 5 configuration with 6 hard drives and the container has
room for 2 more hard drives. There are 2 partitions on these drives; the C
Drive with a 4.0 GB partition and the E Drive with a 46.0 GB partition. The
C: drive has 650 MB free and the E: Drive has just over 10 GB free. The
Exchange Information Store is located on the E: Drive.

PROBLEM
When the C: drive partition starts to fill up with TMP files and the free
space reduces the Exchange services begin to stop running, forcing me to
clean the up the TMP files to free up some space.

Try changing the values for TEMP and TMP to a directory on the E:
drive. Right click My Computer > Advanced tab > Environment Variables.

QUESTION
How can I safely add additional space to the C: Drive Partition without
having to rebuild the machine. Is there a way to do this. Can I add another
hard drive and allocate this space to the C: Drive Partition?

Lookup Dynamic Disks in Help.