I have a failed HD (well I assume so, it keeps dropping out of my RAID,
but the tools I have to test it don't see it on my PCI card) so I need
to replace it - simple enough.
Unfortunately I can't source a suitable 160G HD to match my existing one
(a Maxtor one with 8M cache - I can only get 2M), and given the prices I
decided to nab a couple of Seagate 250G drives with 16M cache instead.
This leaves me trying to work out the best way to migrate across to the
new drives.
o option 1 would be to match the partition sizes and rebuild the RAID,
then use the extra space to create a couple more partitions as seems
sensible
o option 2 would be to increase the existing partition sizes, but this
would require creating a new RAID mirror (with initilly only one drive)
to move the data onto and then 'rebuilding' onto the second replacement
drive once the whole setup was running in a degraded state on the new
drive - which sounds problematic to say the least (although I could
strip the machine down, create the new RAID partitions on the new drive
pair and migrate the data across from a boot CD or other alternative
boot media
Has anyone done this by some super whizzy easy way? The ideal would be
to create the partitions on the new replacement drive at the new sizes,
sync the data back up and then fail the smaller drive and put the second
larger drive in - this would leave me with lots of wasted space as my
reading goes since the capacity would be limited to the original
partition size (I don't think it would suddenly make use of the extra
space once the smaller drive was removed - nice though that may be!!).
Oh, and I know somebody is bound to utter the letters LVM in one reply
or another, but I'm still not confident enough with mixing RAID and LVM
- it seems to be adding an extra layer of complexiting between me and my
data should something go wrong - at least with a RAID mirror the
partitions are easily accessible as standard EXT3 drives (although I
should read up a bit more on it I guess!).
Anyhoo... optio 2b is looking the best atm (as in separate boot media)
--
Paul Tansom | Aptanet Ltd. | http://www.aptanet.com/
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