Windows 2000 configuration
to support resizable File Systems

Windows 2000 "Simple Volumes" on "Dynamic Disks" can be made larger without performing backup/restore. It does not require a change in drive letter or even a restart. The InfoSlice RAID array augments this feature, by allowing its RAIDed LUNs to be treated by windows as resizable Dynamic Disks. In order for a Windows 2000 NTFS File System, to be resizable, it has to be created on a "Dynamic Disk", as described below. Only NTFS File Systems are resizable in Windows 2000.

1. Once the InfoSlice is configured to support resizable filesystem, open the "Computer Management" window in the Administrator account by clicking on the "Start" button, the selecting "Programs", "Administrative Tools", and finally, "Computer Management" from the pop-up menus. In the "Computer Management" window click on the "Device Manager" in the left pane, right-click on the "Disk drives" in the right pane and select "Scan for hardware changes" in the pop-up menu:

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2. After the scan is completed, you will see one or more disks called "TMI BLOCKIO SCSI Disk Device" in the "Disk Drives" section of the right pane of the "Computer Management" menu:

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3. Click on the "Disk Management" in the left pane. You will see all disks accessible by this Windows 2000 machine in the right pane. In the following example, Disk 2 is the TMI InfoSlice LUN with 100GBytes of disk space, which was prepared to support resizable file systems as described in the Infoslice configuration for resizable Volumes and Filesystems:

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4. Right-click on the "Disk" tab in the right pane corresponding to the InfoSlice disk, and select "Write Signature" from the pop-up menu:

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5. A new window appears, which might have more then one disk showing, if more then one InfoSlice LUN, or other disk drives besides the InfoSlice, has been added but not signed yet. Here you can select to write signatures to all disks which do not have one at once:

Click on the "OK" button after selecting all disks which you are signing.

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6. Once the signature is written, you will see the "Computer Management" window with the "Disk Management" pane still opened. Right-click, in the lower right pane, on the disk you are going to configure, and select "Upgrade to Dynamic Disk..." in the pop-up window:

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7. Another window will appear letting you to select which disks to upgrade to dynamic disks:

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8. Once the disk is upgraded to dynamic disk, you can then format it with NTFS. Right-click on the "Unallocated" space of the dynamic disk you are configuring and select "Create Volume...":

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9. Select "Simple volume" and click "Next" button:

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10. You should assign all the available space in the "Create Volume Wizard" window to the simple volume you are creating, because when you choose to grow this volume, InfoSlice will let you to increase the size of this volume from the Webmin interface. Click on the "Next" button:

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11. Assign a drive letter to this volume or select other options as needed and click "Next" :

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12. When formatting the new InfoSlice volume, you can select "Quick Format" to save time because large volumes can take a very long time to format if this option is not selected, and additional disk verification performed by a long format is completely unnecessary when using RAIDed storage:

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13. Click the "Finish" button:

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14. At this point, the new volume is ready to be used, and if you run out of space on it, you will be able to grow it using remaining InfoSlice space:

If you need to grow the volume, see the detailed instructions on growing "extended simple volume" here.