Problem with Extending Large Dynamic Disk

[Brad]

I have a large group of dynamic disks that create one spanned volume.
Right now it is made up of 6 1.4TB volumes (EMC Clarion). We recently
added 6 more volumes of the same model and I tried to extend the existing
disk via the disk management console. It seemed to go through with no
errors and disk management shows all 12 disks as being part of the spanned
disk. Even after a reboot it still shows up as a single 8.4TB volume and
it still functions properly. Have I hit some kind of limit? Is there a
limit? Is there any way to remove the new disks from the group?

Win2000 Advanced SP3
EMC PowerPath 3.0.5
Emulex LightPulse LP-9000 Adapter Rev 3.90A7

 

[Sto Rage©]

Did you get this resolved?
We had the exact same problem although we don't have such a large volume. We
called Dell (since we bought the clariion thru them) and the tech said its a
bug in Windows 2000 and asked us to apply SP4. Even after the SP4 patch and
reboot, nothing changed. We ended up re creating the spanned volume afresh
and restoring the data ( 2 days effort)
Wondering how long its gonna take you to backup and restore 8.4TB of data.
Anyway good luck with that
-G

 

[Brad]

Fortunately I didn't have to do a restore because I still had the data on
another disk. It turns out that at the cluster size we are running, 16TB
was the limit for the volume size. If I did 11 disks it worked fine, but
the 12th disk put it over the top. I decided to leave them as 2 8.4TB
volumes and handle the management through our software. Just keep this as
a warning that Windows (2000 and 2003 as confirmed by MS) will not give
you a warning if you try to extend past the limit and you will have a disk
that you can't use (the newly extended-to one, not the whole volume).
They said they would work a warning into the next SP.