installed new hard drive - now can't find it

[Rick Stevens]

Dana Holland wrote:
>>    As others have suggested by now we didn't know this was hardware RAID.
> 
> 
> Yes, as I told Rick privately, we didn't know either.  We have 
> experience with any of this.

Yup, they spoke to me "privately".  Hi, Dana.

> Dell did walk us through various steps and the afacli utility *does* see 
> the new drive.  However,  we still haven't figured out how to start 
> using the space that's supposedly there.  We know about fdisk, but we 
> don't really know how to use it.

Dana informed me that this is a hardware RAID5 setup.  If you used
Dell's utility and added the drive to the RAID volume, it's not really
going to help too much as the "drive" (RAID cluster) is already
partitioned and the partition sizes are set.  What you _should_ have is
unallocated space on the "drive" now.

Assuming the "drive" is /dev/sda, you can "fdisk -l" and see the
partition table.  For example (this is an IDE drive):

[root at prophead xinit]# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 163.9 GB, 163928604672 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19929 cylinders  <<---NOTE THAT LAST NUMBER
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

    Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *         1       131   1052226   83  Linux
/dev/hda2           132      5353  41945715   83  Linux
/dev/hda3          5354     10575  41945715   83  Linux
/dev/hda4         10576     19929  75136005    f  Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5         10576     11097   4192933+  83  Linux
/dev/hda6         11098     11228   1052226   82  Linux swap
/dev/hda7         11229     19929  69890751   83  Linux

You'll note that partition 7 (/dev/hda7) goes through the last cylinder
of the disk.  In your case, you should see some unallocated space at
the end of the drive (e.g. the drive will have 25000 cylinders and
the last partition ends on cylinder 23272, leaving 1728 cylinders
unused).

If that's true, you can use gparted and move things around to make that
space usable.  WARNING: parted/gparted are NOT for the faint of heart
and it's VERY easy to completely hose your drive.  BACK UP EVERYTHING
before you even make an attempt!
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
- Do not taunt the sysadmins, for they are subtle and quick to anger -
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