Merging unallocated space to existing partition in Raid5

dell-poweredgepartitionraid5

I have Dell PowerEdge Server T310 built with a Raid5 (3 x 300gb)
Windows Server 2008 R2
SAS controller PERC H700.

I have recently added a 4th drive 300gb thru Dell’s application “Openmanage”. The whole procedure went well.
Now I want to merge the unallocated space with the Datapart1 (see below), the system does not permit to extend volume, and when I try to format the unallocated space I get an error saying “the disk already contains the maximum number of partition”.

My question is;
How do I do it?
Do I have to copy all data from Datapart1 to a spare drive, delete the partition and recreate a new one using all the space available?
Or is there another way?

Tried to post snap shot of disk, but I don’t have enough reputation, sorry.

39 mb no name – (OEM Partition),
3.00 gb Recovery – (System, Active, Primary Partition),
40.00 gb OS (C:) – (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition),
514.71 gb Datapart1 (D:) – (Logical Drive),
278.88 gb Unallocated

Best Answer

Finally, the only way I was able to merged the extra space was;

  1. Backup all the data on that partition.
  2. Delete the partition
  3. Create a new partition using all available space.
  4. Then restore the volume backup.

The reason I had to do it this way is because Windows Server 2008 R2 does not let you have more than 4 partitions no matter what software you use i.e.: (partition magic). So the extra space I had created was unallocated and I could not initialize it or expand the existing partition.

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