On Wed, 16 Aug 2006, andy liebman wrote: > Thanks Gordon, > > I may not have been clear what I was asking. I wanted to know if you can > make DISK IMAGES -- for example, with a program like Norton Ghost or > Acronis True Image (better) -- of EACH of the two OS drives from a > mirrored pair. Then restore Image A to one new disk, Image B to another > disk. And then have a new working mirrored pair. Right (I think) so at the end of the day, you want N servers each with a pair of mirrored drives in it, or do you want N servers each with one drive in it? I was assuming N servers with a pair of mirrored drives, all setup identically... > There is absolutely NO PROBLEM making images of single disks and > restoring them to new disks (thus, creating clones). And it is very > fast. For an OS drive with about 4 GBs of data, it only takes about 5 > minutes to make the image and 3 to restore it. So, after making the > first set of images, it would in theory take under 10 minutes to restore > a mirrored pair. Imaging a partition or whole drive can be done with 'dd', but the partition/drive needs to be offline or read-only when you do this or you'll miss the filesystem cache and end up copying incorrect data. What you can do is fill the partition (if it's a file system) with zeros; dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile ; rm bigfile, then feed it through gzip to make the image smaller if desierd. > I'm just trying to find out if there would be any "gotchas" in restoring > mirrored drives. I can't think of any, but you never know. I'm not > worried about hostnames. That's easy to fix. Other than losing data you put in the drives after you made the clone, I don't think so, but I may still be a little confused as to what you are trying to achieve though ... Gordon - 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
