Hi, I couldn't find this one in the FAQ, hopefully someone can offer some suggestions before I make a big mistake! I have a RAID5 going based on a Mandrake 7.1 distro. Three IDE drives on a motherboard with 4 IDE channels (so will support 8 IDE devices). All three drives have been partitioned in the same way as I originally planned to run RAID1 on the other partitions. So: hda - contains operating system and is raid-disk 0 in raidtab hdc - the position of the cdrom drive hde - contains partitions for the operating system and is raid-disk 1 in raidtab hdg - same as hde, but is raid-disk 2 in raidtab My problem is that hda is failing... the dreaded tic-tac noise and poor response from the system. A simple tape backup pushes the load average to almost 2. I'm 99% sure hda is the one making the noise. So it has to be replaced as smoothly as possible. My plan is to copy the os partitions to hdg, using the hard disk upgrade mini how-to. In theory, this disk could then be moved to the position of hda and boot. However, I'm concerned about how the RAID will handle this. 1) If, before physically moving the drive around, I edited raidtab on hdg to make raid-disk 2 refer to device /dev/hda4 instead of /dev/hdg4 and show raid disk 0 as /dev/hdg4 marked 'failed disk', would RAID be happy to run and show 2 of 3 disks up? In other words, if a disk is moved to another IDE channel, can one simply update the /dev/hdx info in the device and raid-disk pair? In my case, as long as raid-disk 2 is still the same physical hard drive, just in another position? 2) Is there another way to do this, or a URL to review? So what I want to do is take the portion of raidtab that looks like this: nr-raid-disks 3 device /dev/hda4 raid-disk 0 device /dev/hde4 raid-disk 1 device /dev/hdg4 raid-disk 2 and, just before replacing hda with hdg and installing a new drive at hdg, edit this part of the file to look like this (minus the comments!) nr-raid-disks 3 device /dev/hdg4 (new hard drive) failed-disk 0 device /dev/hde4 raid-disk 1 device /dev/hda4 (was in hdg position before) raid-disk 2 I don't know if my subscription to the list is active yet, so (PLEASE!) cc any responses to brock@nanson.org Thanks! -- Brock Nanson Kamloops BC Canada - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
