I had to do some maintenance on my server over the weekend as one of the hard drives in the RAID array failed. It should have been a simple and straightforward task however it turned out to be the complete opposite.
Although only one of the drives had failed, I replaced both of them with newer, faster and larger capacity drives. I replaced them one at a time and synchronised the array in between each swap out.

Within 6 hours, the two drives were replaced and the server was technically ready to go, but the virtual disk was still the size of the older, smaller drives. No problem, I’ll just select the option to grow its capacity…. hmm, no option for that. No worries, I’ll add a second virtual disk which will use up the space capacity, hmm, nothing there either.

It turns out, as far as I (and google) could work out, there is no way to increase the capacity of the virtual disk.

I proceeded to spend the next 7-8 hours (until 5am Sunday) deleting the virtual disk, creating a new one and cloning the data across. First attempt at cloning the entire disk ended in failure as it must have deleted identification information telling the RAID controller that the disk was part of a RAID array. I decided the best option was to clone the individual partitions across. This also didn’t work.

I ended up spending the rest of Sunday morning reinstalling the operating system from scratch, just in the name of doing things properly and doubling the total storage capacity of the server.

I’m hoping these drives will continue running for another 3-4 years.

In the meantime, if you encounter any issues accessing this website, please contact me as I may have missed a setting somewhere.