On Thu, 8 Jan 2009 21:12:18 +1100, "Alex Samad" <alex@xxxxxxxxxxxx> said: > On Wed, Jan 07, 2009 at 08:19:05PM -0800, whollygoat@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > wrote: > > > > On Tue, 6 Jan 2009 09:17:46 +1100, "Neil Brown" <neilb@xxxxxxx> said: > > [snip] > > > How should I have done the grow operation if not as above? The only > > thing I see in man mdadm is the "-S" switch which seems to disassemble > > the array. Maybe this is because I've only tried it on the degraded > > array this problem has left with. At any rate, after > > > > mdadm -S /dev/md/0 > > > > [snip] > > > > > Hope you can help, > > Hi > > I have grown raid5 arrays either by disk number or disk size, I have > only ever used --grow and never used the -z option > > I would re copy the info over from the small drives to the large drives > (if you can have all the drives in at one time that might be better. > > increase the partition size and then run --grow on the array. I have > done this going from 250G -> 500G -> 750g -> 1T. although when I have > done it, I fail one drive and then add the new drive, expand the > partition size and re add it back into the array, once I have done all > the drives I then ran the grow. > I'm not sure I uderstand what you mean. When you copy the info over and then increase the partition size, are you doing something like dd if=smalldrive of=bigdrive, then using a tool like parted to resize the partition? I put the large drives in (as hot spares) with a single raid partition (type fd) that uses the entire disk, so I can't increase their size any. Then when I failed the drive the data it contained was rebuilt to the larger hot spare. But anyway, I don't think that is going to matter. The issue I am trying to solve is how to de-activate the bitmap. It was suggested on the linux-raid list that my problem may have been caused by running the grow op on an active bitmap and I can't see from "man mdadm" how to de-activate the bit map. The only thing I see about deactivation is --stop and that disassembles the array, in which case I can't run the grow command. I read how to remove the bitmap, but then I guess I would have to readd it after the grow op. In any case, I would like to get the figured out without too much experimentation because swapping drives in and out and rebuilding is pretty time consuming so I would really like to avoid fudging this up again. Thanks for you help goat -- whollygoat@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx -- http://www.fastmail.fm - Access all of your messages and folders wherever you are -- 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
