Expand existing volume

[pelham]

This should be easy for old hands for DSS. When I tried to expand an existing volume by adding existing available drive units, a warning appears saying that any existing data will be lost. Does this apply to the data already on the volume or merely to the new units to be assigned for expanding that existing volume?? The manual is not explicit regards that.

[symm]

What software utility are you using to get this message
Please check that you are NOT recreating your raid set from the bios
you should be adding drives to your exsting raid and then migrating your data (RAID Controller BIOS)
then you can use PV resize in the console to expand the the volume and see the new size

[juergen.eising]

What pelham asked, seems to me absolutely reasonable,
but unfortunately he didnt become an answer.
I am in the same situation and try to expand my volume.
I can use the open-E DSS web interface and then "configuration" -> "volume manager".
A New hard drive appears (unused), which I have build in my controller software before
(Adaptec Storage Manger)
I can expand my volume group then (what is exactly what I want).
After that there comes the prompt, pelham describes (formatting with data loss).
Do I loose data on the old harddisk (which would cost my job)
or just on the new one (which doesnt matter at all, cause there is no data at all?

Thanks in Advance
Juergen

[Robotbeat]

No matter what, you should ALWAYS back up your data before trying to expand any volume in any way. We had a customer who tried this (in his RAID controller) and accidentally selected the wrong option and it wiped his data on that system. He was able to recover his data from another open-e system that had some active snapshots, but it was still a hassle (and quite scary for him).

ALWAYS backup before you do this sort of thing! Is it worth the 10% chance that your data will be lost?

Do I loose data on the old harddisk (which would cost my job)

Frankly, if you don't backup your data before trying this sort of thing (even if we tell you your data will be fine), you should probably lose your job, even if the data is fine!

ALWAYS have a backup, unless you don't care if you lose data. And RAID alone is NOT A BACKUP.

[symm]

you will lose any data on the new hard disk.
as the OS will format the new disk to be added to the current drives.
After the raid migration, you will need to use the PV resize utility to add the new space to the dss