How to Replace Mirrored Drive with a Larger One?

"Can I replace mirrored drive with a larger sized one? I'm using windows 2000's software mirroring. I want to then synchronize the drives and remove the remaining smaller drive and replace that with a larger drive. Then I want to create another partition on the new unallocated space. Is this plan possible? Thought I would ask before I buy my two new large drives."

"I have an Exchange Server that needs more space on the system/boot partition. It is a Dell server with hardware-based mirrored drives. I want to replace mirrored drives with larger capacity drives. Is there an easy way to ghost the drive. I'm a little nervous (probably needlessly) about programs that let you take an online backup since it seems like they alter the boot records in some way (i.e. Acronis TrueImage or Symantec LiveStateRecovery). Does anyone on have feedback on a good program to use or the best way to do this?"

How to replace mirrored drive if you have encountered the above problems? The following will show how to replace software-based mirrored drive and hardware-based mirrored drive.

How to replace software-based mirrored drive with a larger one?

Software-based mirrored drives are mirrored volumes on the dynamic disks. The following is step-by-step instructions to replace software-based mirrored drive with a larger one. Here is as Disk 0, Disk 1 for example.

Tips: Please back up the drive before this operation.

Solution 1:

• 1. Remove mirror from the mirrored drive (Disk 1).
• 2. Shut down the computer and replace mirrored drive (Disk 1) with a larger one.
• 3. Power on computer and convert larger drive to dynamic drive by Disk Management.
• 4. Add mirror to the larger drive.
• 5. Remove mirror from another drive (Disk 0).
• 6. Shut down the computer and replace another drive (Disk 0) with another larger drive.
• 7. Enter into BIOS and set boot sequence from the second HDD.
• 8. Power on computer and convert another larger drive to dynamic drive by Disk Management.
• 9. Since there is a trustable partition management toolkit - EaseUS Partition Master, you can directly resize the mirrored volume as you wish. Use "Resize volume" feature to resize dynamic volume and then you can get an extended mirrored volume.

Solution 2:

• 1. Remove mirror from the mirrored drive (Disk 1).
• 2. Shut down the computer and replace mirrored drive (Disk 1) with a larger one.
• 3. Power on computer and Launch EaseUS Partition Master.
• 4. Copy all dynamic volumes on Disk 0 to the larger drive by "Copy dynamic volume" feature of EaseUS Partition Master.

• 5. When clicking "Apply", please tick "Shut down the computer after changes are applied". After copy is completed, please replace Disk 0 with the larger disk. And then add another larger disk.
• 6. After boot, you can resize or create partitions on the copied disk. And then convert basic disk to dynamic disk and add mirror to another larger disk by Disk Management.

How to replace hardware-based mirrored drive with a larger one?

Hardware-based mirrored drives are RAID 1. If you only want to replace hardware-based mirrored drive with a larger one, just need to replace one of the mirrored drives, which is very simple. If you want to replace hardware-based mirrored drive with a larger one and use full size of larger drive, please create new array and then clone/image source array to the new array. After booting from new array, you can use "Resize/Move partition" feature of EaseUS Partition Master to resize RAID 1 partitions to expand the original size to occupy all space on the new array.

 

Related Articles:

Feedback on this article:

Thanks for visiting EaseUS, please let us know how we can improve this article or make it more useful to you. Should you need technical support please feel free to contact support@partition-tool.com.

1. Did this article help you?

Yes No Somewhat

2. What can we do to improve this article?

To protect your privacy, do not include your contact information in the feedback.