Sentient Beings, RAID on parititions vs. raw disks: I built a raid-5 array with six 500gb SATA disks. For some reason which I can no longer remember but related I suspect to hubris, I built the array directly on the drive devices rather than making a fullsize partition. As a consequence, I assemble the array from /dev/sd[bcdefg] instead of /dev/sd[bcdefg]1. In reality, because my motherboard seems to like to shuffle the order of recognition, my boot drive isn't always /dev/sda so in practice I do: mdadm -Ac partitions -m 0 /dev/md0 When I built the array, some of the drives were virgin, some had a factory NTFS format, and some were previously partitioned by me for linux use. The problem I have now is twofold: 1. There are remnants of the partition tables still on the drives, despite those partitions being meaningless. 2. I'd actually like to have clean /dev/sd?1 partitions on each drive in the array marked with the raid identifier. Is there away to non-destructively adjust the partition tables, or resize the array to allow for 2.? If not, is there a good way to clean up 1. so that there are no longer any partition tables on the drive? Partitions on RAID: Back to when I constructed the array, I placed an ext3 partition directly on /dev/md0. Since construction, I have expanded the array by two disks, but have not at this time resized the ext3 partition. What I would like to do is put a swap partition and XFS partition into that 1TB free space. However, I have no idea how to go about doing that. If I had originally used LVM, it would be easy, but I had read about some performance hits re ext3 on lvm on raid so I decided to be "simple". Any advice? Thanks! Cry - 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
