On Thursday 06 January 2005 19:30, Mike Hardy wrote: > maarten wrote: > > I was planning to do this quickly tonight, but I've overlooked one > > essential thing ;-| The old server has already 220 GB of data built of 4 > > 80GB disks in raid-5. But I cannot connect all 8 disks at the same time, > > so I'll have to 'free up' another system to define the arrays and copy > > the data over Gbit LAN. I definitely don't want to lose the data! > > What complicates this a bit is that I wanted to copy the OS verbatim (it > > is not part of that raid-5 set, just raid-1). But I suppose booting a > > rescue CD would enable me to somehow netcat the OS over to the new > > disks... We'll see. > > You could degrade the current raid5 set by plugging one of the new > drives in and copying the 220GB to it directly, then you could build the > new raid5 sets with one drive "missing" and then finally dump the data > on the new raid5's and then hotadd the missing drive Hey. I knew that trick of course, but only now that you mention it I realize that indeed one single new disk is big enough to hold all of the old data. Stupid :) I never though of that. Go figure. Those disks get BIG indeed...! :-)) Right now I took my main(*) fileserver offline, unplugged all the disks from it and connected the new disks. Using a RIP CDrom I partitioned them and 'mkraid'ed (mdadm not yet being on RIP) the first md device which will hold the OS. As we speak the netcat session is running, so if I didn't make any typos or thinkos soon I will hopefully reboot to a full-fledged system. (*) These new disks are not for my _fileserver_, but for my MythTV PVR, the machine they will eventually end up in, which holds the 220 GB TV & movies. So far, so good... Maarten -- - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
