How to create dynamic volume in stripe configuration, aligned to 1024

diskpartpartitionwindows-server-2003

I am trying to create a software stripe setup with two physical disks (underneath they are 128K stripe, RAID5 for each). I've read that one can use diskpart, but I am unable to come up with a command that works. This is on Server 2k3 SP2.

I was trying

create volume stripe disk=2,3 align=1024

Diskpart errors out:

The arguments you specified for this command are not valid.

P.S. Tried successfully with a basic disk and a primary partition.

Please reply,

-Greg

Best Answer

Is sure looks like the "align=" option wasn't added to DISKPART for creating striped volumes until Windows Vista (it's in there for basic disks back to W2K). Having said that, you might have a shot at doing this by booting a Windows Server 2008 DVD on your machine, breaking out to a command-prompt with Shift-F10 and using DISKPART from there.

Edit:

I spun up a VMware Server 2.0 VM with two (2) SCSI hard disk drives and the W2K8 Standard x86 install DVD image. I booted, dropped out to a command prompt via repair, and did:

diskpart
select disk 0
clean
convert dynamic
select disk 1
clean
convert dynamic
create volume stripe disk=0,1 align=1024
assign volume 0
exit
format c: /q /u /fs:ntfs

After formatting the new volume I shutdown the VM, then attached the two (2) SCSI disks to an existing W2K3-based VM I had sitting around. I booted the W2K3 VM, logged-on and opened "Computer Management" and found that the foreign disks were detected. I imported them and found that my striped volume was accessible. I copied some files to it and found no problems.

Give that a shot. Worst case, if you don't have a W2K8 DVD laying around, download the W2K8 120-day demo DVD and use that.

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