I currently have a mirrored RAID using 2 identical 40 Gig Hard Drives. They are getting a bit cramped and I purchased 2 identical 120 Gig hard drives. I would like to know how to swap them out for the 40 Gig drives while retaining the contents of the original drives so I don't have to reinstall or restore data files. Can anyone tell me how to do this? :confused:

Its not clear whether these are IDE, SCSI or SATA drives and how many free slots you have available for them or whether the RAID is on the mobo or a pc controller card - so that means giving advice can only be rather general.

If these were IDE devices, for example, you could add one of the 120gig drives and then copy everything from the 40gig array (or from just one of the mirrored drives) to the 120gig using partitioning utilities such as Partition Magic or a utility from the HDD maker.

You could also image the array to one of the 120 gigs, then restore the image to the other 120 gig, then delete the image file and rebuild the mirror from the second to the first HDD.

Etc, etc. Hope you get the idea - but it all depends largely on your hardware exactly what way to go about things.

Paul,
Thanks for the general info. I am not very sophisticated with hardware. The missing pieces of information are: IDE drives with the RAID controller on the motherboard - Gigabyte GA-81RXP with Intel 845 AGPset and a Pentium 4 - 3.2. Current Hard Drives are Maxtor 40 Gigabytes. I would like to replace them because I am out of drive bays ( 7 in 1 card, audigy platinum, DVD+RW, DVD-RW, DVD drive, and CD-RW and 100 Gig SCSI drive, 2-40 Gig IDE drives - you don't want to ask why ). Will the 120 drive be able to participate in a RAID after I transferred all of the 40 gig contenets to them?

That board has two connectors for the normal IDE/ATAPI cables. Attach one of the 120gigs to one of those connectors and then copy the array on the 40gig drives to the 120gig (same way you would copy an ordinary hdd to a new one). Remove both 40's from the RAID connections on the mobo and replace with the two 120s (one with the copy of the raid array and one unformatted). Rebuild the array from the Promise Setup Screens.

It's up to you what software you use to accomplish the copying, which could be used in such a way that just 40gig is copied and then it would be up to you to expand or customise the remaining 80gig or use partition software that will expand all the existing partitions to accomodate all of the 120gig as part of one manouvre.

Thanks, Paul. I was hoping that it was going to be more straight forward, but I guess I can manage this. I'll give it a whirl, and I'll let you know how it turns out. :)

There is a "simple approach" whereby you break the array and replace a 40 with a 120. Then repeat with the other 40 and 120. You would be left with a 40gig mirror on the pair of 120s but I don't know if you could directly expand it at that point in time to utilise all of the drives' capacity.

Personally I'm never happy when messin' with any partitions and I would always have an image file (I use drive image) of the drive before doing anything else. That way you can always experiment to your heart's content. When restoring such image files (in your case onto the 120gig mirror) drive image can expand the partitions to occupy all the unallocated space.