From: John Beckett 

Ellen K  wrote in message
news::
> 2 drives as a mirrored pair - boot partition goes here and another drive
letter
> for the transaction log

Is there a reason for two partitions? It's handy to separate the system
files from your data, but there is no good reason to have two partitions on
the one physical drive.

> currently the boot partition is only 4 GB and the NT admin says it HAS to
> have a swap file of at least 1.2 GB

4GB is a bit mean, although ok with NT4. I see later in your message that
the admin wants 8GB - a good idea. Uh oh - I see in another message that it
is Windows 2000 - 4GB is very bad.

You don't really HAVE to have a swap file on the boot partition. That is,
you could move the 1.2GB swap file to another drive.

Presumably you have 1GB of RAM so your swap file is supposed to be that
size or a bit more. If you don't have the swap file on the boot partition,
and if the operating system crashes but is healthy enough to dump RAM, it
wants to dump the RAM to the swap file. However, in that scenario, the swap
file must be on the boot partition. So, the penalty for having the swap
file on another drive is that you can't get a memory dump after a crash.
Most people have decided that this is not a real problem and are quite
happy - what would you do with a 1.2GB memory dump anyway?

> I asked whether we could replace the two 18's in the mirrored pair with 36's
> and he freaked.

I can understand why. Any change like this could have devastating side
effects. It might be very simple, largely depending on the capabilities of
your RAID system. I think you need to ask  the RAID vendor. However, you
would need one of those magic partition-expanding programs to take
advantage of the extra space from the larger drive.

> if we do this we will screw up anything with the other 4 disks.

Probably not!

John

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