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Software raid
| Posted by floppydisk, 02-25-2011, 09:32 PM | | Hello all,
Been learning everything on the fly and although I possess an aptitude for it I am still a neophyte.
A few months back I set up a dedicated server with 2 identical HDDs. Running Centos 5 64. I ordered JBOD as I seen no reason to spend the extra $$ on hardware raid at this point. My second disk right now is only being used for Cpanel scheduled backups.
Been reading a bit on mdadm but am still a bit hesitant. I do not want to have to reconfigure EVERYTHING and backup and reload all my data.
Will there be a way I can partition the unused disk (and which partitions do I want for raid? all or just some?) and just set up raid without having to do an OS reload.
Isn't there an easy way to do this. I would really appreciate some direction.
Thanks
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| Posted by funkywizard, 02-25-2011, 10:25 PM | | if you could get the DC to temporarily give you two extra hard drives, that would be the easiest way as you could create the raid 1 set, copy all your data over, and reboot into the new drives. once you get that working, have the dc remove the old drives.
would be happy to hear if you can convert existing drives from non-raid to raid... but my gut reaction is it's probably not possible or at least not advisable
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| Posted by Preetam, 02-26-2011, 01:52 AM | | Your gut is wrong
I tried out a tutorial I found online, and it works fine. You need to convert the 2nd disk to a degraded RAID 1 array, copy over the files, boot from the RAID array, then sync the drives.
It takes a few hours but it works fine.
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| Posted by funkywizard, 02-26-2011, 02:54 AM | | glad to hear
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| Posted by Tomas-M, 02-26-2011, 08:38 AM | | For experienced Linux admin that is very simple task. But not for someone who is not much geek; it is not simply obvious how to setup master boot record on the second disk (degregated raid 1 array) and how to make it boot, considering you can't change BIOS settings if you're using a dedicated server and you're on the server only using SSH.
However it can be done, indeed. I did similar thing few days ago just to replace Debian by Slackware on a running server. THAT is more hardcore
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| Posted by net, 02-26-2011, 09:20 AM | | Moved > Hosting Security and Technology.
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