Hello, My name is Vince Spinelli, from Buffalo, NY (US). I am currently using 'mdadm' under Fedora Core 5 (32-bit) to run two Soft-RAID arrays. 1) RAID-1 (mirror) for mission critical data. #drives = 2 ea. PATA ATA100 2) RAID-5 (striped+parity) for multimedia data. #drives = 5 ea. SATA 3G My question is this... In case of catastropic machine failure, such as the operating system (which is on a separate PATA ATA100 drive) failing or even the OS hard drive being physically destroyed, how would I go about rebuilding my RAID arrays? Obviously, this would assume that the 7 disks which make up my arrays had survived and were not damaged. -I would obviously then build a new computer, -install Linux, make sure 'mdadm' was installed, -physically install all of my drives into the computer, -copy my old /etc/mdadm.conf file (which has been saved on cd-rom but is easily re-made) onto the new computer, - and then what? I have thought about this, and I can't understand how 'mdadm' decides the health of an array. For example, if I type at prompt: /sbin/mdadm --detail /dev/md1 then I am given the current status of array 'md1'. It may be clean, degraded, recovering, or whatever. Therefore, on a fresh install of Linux, with a fresh copy of 'mdadm', I am led to believe that the result of the previous command would be something like... Active Devices = 0 Working Devices = 4 Failed Devices = 0 Spare Devices = 4 That, obviously would be no good. So, please, if anyone has rebuilt a Soft-RAID array from scratch WHILE STILL PRESERVING THE DATA ON THAT ARRAY with 'mdadm', please explain how this is accomplished, as I'm sitting on 1.5 TB of data that I truly do not want to lose. Thank You, - Vince --------------------------------------- Vince Spinelli University at Buffalo: EE --------------------------------------- "Kind of off his mental reservation." - ancient cowboy wisdom. --------------------------------------- Vince@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [vfs@xxxxxxxxxxx / vfs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] --------------------------------------------------------- SpinelliCreations Secure Webmail: Powered by SquirrelMail - 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
