Tutorial: How to replace volume 1 disk with bigger

[repulse 3]

REMEMBER TO BACKUP BEFORE MESSING WITH DISKS OR PARTITIONS/VOLUMES

 

Tested on DSM 6.1 through ESXI 6 here.

 

Few days ago, my DSM started complaining about low disk space available on volume 1.

It was only 16gb.

So, i tried to expand it few times after expanding .vmdk but "Extend" buttond stay grayed.

 

After few tries and installations f*cked up, here is the way i did it, and it should work on barebone install too :

 

Keep the disk you want to "copy" in the Diskstation, then put the new drive in avalible slot, and make them to RAID1 - mirror.

When the its done, then remove old volume 1 disk and add change freshly added disk to whatever was ancient volume 1 (i.e scsi 0:0, or 0:1).

 

This will give you a degraded state Raid 1 with only new volume 1.

Then activate Telnet an use this command :

 

mdadm --grow --raid-devices=1 --force /dev/md2

(RAID1 to BASIC)

Now the new disk is basic again an you can expand it to its full size.