AMI FlexRAID Online Raid Expansion with Novell NetWare

All American Megatrends Raid controllers currently shipped by Mitsubishi Electric PC Division support online raid expansion.

This feature allows the integration of new drives into an active Raid 0, 3 or 5 array non-destructively.

To support this feature with Novell NetWare, the Flexraid option must be enabled when creating the NetWare partition. This allows a virtual partition of 80GB to be created allowing for future upgrade.

The default setting for FlexRAID when creating a virgin raid array is disabled.
When installing NetWare with the default setting, the partition created will be the size of the logical drive. If the FlexRAID option is then Enabled after the NetWare partition has been created, the extra unused space of the logical drive will be offered as free space but as only one NetWare partition can be created per drive, whether physical or logical, the free space can not be used by NetWare.

If On Line Raid expansion is to be used, the FlexRAID option MUST be enabled before installing NetWare. If the option was disabled at instillation, the NetWare partition will have to be destroyed and a new partition built.

The FlexRAID option is within the AMI Utilities (CTRL – M) under OBJECTS –LOGICAL DRIVES after an array has been configured.

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