Partitioning 2003 Server

Hey guys,
I need a little direction here. For the past week or so, I've been searching for a solution to help me partition a 2003 Server R2(standard edition). In a nutshell, I need to resize the C: drive & I'd much rather not have to format & reinstall. I checked on a bunch of things -paragon, acronis, disk commander, gnome, super fdisk, cute partition manager, even diskpart (this comes with the OS).

The most promising solution was Gnome Partition Editor because I'd rather not spend $300-$800 on a program I'll probably only use once or twice. So, I downloaded the Gnome Partition Manager LiveCD .iso and burned it to a cd. Only to put it in during bootup and nothing happened.

Let me jusy say that I'm not entirely sure how .iso's work to begin with. I was under the impression that you burn these image files to a CD and then you could boot from it. Am I correct in my assumption? I feel like I'm missing something. I read through Gnome's HTML help file only to get more confused. I read on other forums that people used Gnome to partition their Windows servers but, the help files make it seem like you need Linux?

Anyway, any ideas on how I'm supposed to use this Gnome product and/or how to go about resizing the C: drive on my server would be of great help. Thanks.

The last time I had to resize an NTFS partition... I simply used my SuSE Linux install disc.


My guess is that you simply need to change the boot order in your BIOS. There may also be some option to change it after POST... by pressing F8 or something.

did you burn the contents of the ISO to the disk or do you now have a disk with an iso file on it? cos if you did the later you did it wrong.

Assuming you are running this on a server and assuming you have a raid, especially if its one that has been in use a while I wouldn't recomend trying to do it WITHOUT reformating. I hear bad things happen on a raid fragment wise that tend to mess up when you repartition and that defraging is a good way to make them cry too. I could be wrong of course.

I did burn the .iso contents to CD, not the .iso itself. So, it should have worked but, you bring up a great point about RAID. It is indeed using RAID & it should have dawned on me after I read that link on EIT's site in regards to the major backup failure.
It probably is in my best interest to reformat and re-install. I was hoping to avoid having to re-install Symantec services due to all the damn patches I've installed since the inital setup. sigh.
Oh well guys, thanks for the input.

you need to burn the .iso as an IMAGE, not a file.

Did you try booting another pc from the same disk? And like Synful said... I'd check the bootpriority or see if you need to press a key to boot from cd (like a Windows CD would ask you).

Personally....I would never use disk partitioning on a server already installed...

specially in a RAID array...

Servers need to be stable...

My .02 cdn

MLF

Quote:

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Originally Posted by morganlefay

Personally....I would never use disk partitioning on a server already installed...

specially in a RAID array...

Servers need to be stable...

My .02 cdn

MLF

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I had no idea it was RAID or I would have never mentioned that.

MLF is right... Starting from scratch is the only safe way to go with this.

Yeah, the server is using RAID. I should have indicated that in my initial post. I have already made up my mind that the best thing to do is format & reinstall. The good thing is that we just purchased a file server (to take the place of this server). So after I migrate the files over, I won't have to worry so much about downtime.
Thanks again for the help. It appears that there's no shortcut on this one.

RAID - "kills bugs dead" :eek:

Yes I am facing expanding drive space on the server myself (fricken exchange users.... :roll:) and yes I can add more space to the array....but not the partition....

Server needs a nice clean install anyway....

I am procrastinating right now...

Moving shite around\archiving, cleaning up...may have given me somemore time

:(

MLF