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GregC
Asked: 2009-06-25 15:06:09 +0800 CST

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

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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

windows-server-2003 partition diskpart

2 Answers

  1. 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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  2. I tried that and I have two comments:

    1- (Minor comment): "assign volume 0" is not a valid command. You need to write "assign letter=n".

    2- (Important comment): I tried it in both Windows 7 pro and Windows Server 2008 R2 and although DISKPART will let you do it without generating an error, it will not align the partitions at all. Both msinfo32 and "AS SSD" will tell you that your partitions are not aligned. I tried with align=1024, align=2048, 4096, 8192, 16384 and 65536 and none of them worked.

    I hope somebody will prove me I am wrong.

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