On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 09:52:45 +0200, Clinton Lee Taylor <clintonlee.taylor@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Was thinking or hoping, that we could do installs with a degraded > RAID mirror ( single drive ), but I think I saw Jeremy ( could be > wrong ), explain that we could rather reserver extra superblocks, and > convert an ext3 partition to a RAID mirror, with a little less effort. Note that degraded and a raid 1 array that is complete but only has one device are different cases. Reserving extra space for the meta data is tricky, as different amounts can be used (in different locations) depending how raid is being set up. If you don't know how it will eventually be set up, you'll want to make a worst cases guess. > So, my question is, where could I find the information to mess with > ext3 to RAID 1 convertion and could we really look at putting this > into anaconda for installs. You need to change the partition code and run mdadm to create the array. As long as the meta data doesn't overwrite the data it should work. If the intention is to support only raid 1 (the most common case where people might want this), then I suggest creating the raid array first with just one element. > Motivation - Well, we believe in having our boot and OS ( lightly > used ) drives always mirror to keep low, down time, but when we do > upgrades or re-installs, we try and keep one drive out of the install > to recover conf files, setting and the like and once the install is > running ( a day or two ), we then add the drive back into the RAID and > sync. At the moment, we have to take a spare drive with to do > installs and upgrade and then hardware get's a little out of sync with > what might have been orginally purchased, leaving us with odd sized > drives ... If you can throw in spare drives, you can use a drive at least as big as what's in there, add it to the mirror, let it sync and remove it from the mirror. And then you have your backup on disk. I typically want to be able to do this when changing the disk layout. I don't have spare disks to plug in and don't want to do a full recovery from DVDs or tape, when using one of my mirrors is faster. _______________________________________________ Anaconda-devel-list mailing list Anaconda-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/anaconda-devel-list
