I upgraded one of my 250gb drives with a 320gb....the 320 is now having problems and I want to put the 250 back in but it is telling me it is too small. I did install windows on the drive (250) so it is not the same as when I took it out. The 320 only has around 100gb on it. Why can't I put the 250 back in without loosing data?

 

 

Thanks,

Scott

I upgraded one of my 250gb drives with a 320gb....the 320 is now having problems and I want to put the 250 back in but it is telling me it is too small. I did install windows on the drive (250) so it is not the same as when I took it out. The 320 only has around 100gb on it. Why can't I put the 250 back in without loosing data?

 

 

Thanks,

Scott

The file-system has already been expanded to the full size of the 320 Gig drive...  It doesn't care if you've only filled part of it.

 

Do you have room in your array to add the old drive temporally without removing any of the originals? , (an extra port on a disk controller, even if not a physical slot to mount the extra drive)

 

If so, we can partition it, format it as a reiserfs, copy the contents of the 320 onto the 250, then

Un-assign the 320, assign the 250, then press "Restore" to save a new disk configuration, and rebuild parity.  (There's no shortcut here, not really, since the drive sizes are different)

 

Joe L.

Thats what I thought Joe...thanks.

 

I just temp hooked up the 320 back into the array and am copying the data to a drive with some free space. After I will remove the 320 and hook the 250 in it's place and hit "restore"...right?

Thats what I thought Joe...thanks.

 

I just temp hooked up the 320 back into the array and am copying the data to a drive with some free space. After I will remove the 320 and hook the 250 in it's place and hit "restore"...right?

You left out one step, after you swap out the drives, you need to assign the 250 on the devices page to the slot the 320 was in. Then once you press "Restore" the 320 will be forgotten.  The 250 will be seen as "unformatted" and you will then need to press the "Format" button to re-format it.  Once part of the array, you can move data back onto it if you desire.