Can I repartition C drive on 2003 DC

[Jeff Viola]

My last server had a small C drive and I was constantly trying to free up
space, so I had this (what I thought) great idea of just having 1 large
partition. I have one C drive on a array controller (RAID 5) 273 Gigs.

I want to have a system drive and a data drive. So a C and D drive. Can I
repartion with a 3rd party repartitioning software to make a 48 Gig C drive
and the remainer for D? Remember this is a production server, domain
controller, Operation Master. How would you proceed?

[Peter Lawton]

One thing to bear in mind is the maximum boot partition size your RAID
controller supports.

This used to be either 2Gb, 4Gb or 8Gb, depending on what you selected when
you created the volume. Some more recent controllers support larger sizes.

The danger is that you can make the partition larger and it will work fine
for a while until you do a defrag or apply a patch which moves one of the
boot files above the limit, then the machine won't boot any more.

[Jeff Viola]

Uhm?? I have 1 dell hidden partiton and then I have 1 very large C drive
273gigs which I belive is my boot partition?? Are you saying that I can't do
a defrag on it or some patches might make it unbootable? Confused?

[Peter Lawton]

It's definitely happened to me several times in the past, but now I'm
careful not to create a boot partition bigger than the maximum size
supported by the RAID controller. For example with the HP 5i controllers you
get a choice of 4Gb or 8Gb when you create the array.

This is mainly an issue with RAID and SCSI controllers I think, not IDE or
SATA, but I expect someone can clarify this?

[Will]

Do the right thing, reinstall the server. Use a desktop to add a adicional
DC during the process and move the FSMO to the desktop. Make a backup of the
all necessary data. Reinstall the server. After reinstalling the server,
promote again and move the FSMO back. Demote the desktop.

[goback]

this is an easy question, I think Jeff wants to shrink the partition which hold the entire space, and then create new partition with the unallocated space. I often do this, shrink and expand, or resize partitions, my server also is RAID configged, only by drag and move on the disk map, why Will gave such a complex suggestion?