Expand a disk drive

You can expand a virtual disk drive (network server storage space) without copying the disk drive. For information about expanding a boot disk, see Expand a system drive.

To expand a disk drive, follow these steps:

1. Expand Integrated Server Administration -> All Virtual Disks.
2. Select a disk drive from the list available.
3. Right-click the disk drive and select Properties or click the appropriate icon on the iSeries™ Navigator toolbar.
4. Click on the Capacity tab of the disk drive property sheet.
5. Specify the increased disk size in the New capacity field. See the on-line help for details on valid disk sizes associated with a particular file system format. The extended portion of the disk will be unpartitioned free space.
6. Click OK.
7. If the disk is linked to an active server, a confirmation panel is shown to indicate that the disk drive will be temporarily unavailable to the server while the disk is being expanded. Click Change on the confirmation panel to confirm that this is acceptable, or click Cancel on the confirmation panel to cancel the disk expansion operation.

1. The disk cannot be linked to an active server while it is being expanded. If the server supports dynamic unlinking of disk drives, then the above procedure can be performed while the server is active. In this case, the disk is dynamically unlinked, then expanded and then dynamically relinked to the server again. Therefore, the disk is temporarily unavailable to the active server while the disk is being expanded.
2. The DISKPART command line utility can be used to expand an existing partition in order to utilize any additional free space.
   Note:
   DISKPART is available by default on Windows Server 2003. It can also be downloaded from the Microsoft®
   web page (www.microsoft.com). Refer to the Microsoft Knowledge base articles for DISKPART for details and limitations.
3. Expansion of an existing network server storage space has some limitations depending on how the storage space was originally allocated.

If you want to use the CL command, see Change Network Storage Space (CHGNWSSTG). Note that when using CHGNWSSTG to expand the disk, the disk cannot be linked to an active server. CHGNWSSTG will not automatically unlink and relink the disk if the server is active.