Having made the spectacular mistake of undersizing my root partition I am inquiring the best way to delete an existing linear raid and create a new secondary / partition which will be used to install a fresh debian system. I should also say that I'm not a linux expert, although computer literate and with experience of installing debian previously hence the detailed "check list." My system contains the following... 2 "system and other data drives" on a 2 port sata card. 6 "pure data drives, raid6" on motherboard. The two system disks have the following (X=g or h) GPT partitions. sdX1 bios boot 1MB sdX2 Raid1 boot 210MB (md0) sdX3 Raid1 root 13GB (md1)<<< keep for old debian sdX4 Swap 9.7GB sdX5 Raid1 home 11GB (md2)(not used for users, root does have a small about of data/folders set up in it) sdX6 Linear 54GB (md3)<<< to be new root for new debian sdX7 Raid1 data 413GB (md4) I'm guessing what I need to do is with the existing debian install is the following. (this is where I need conformation) unmount the Linear volume /dev/md3 stop the array Make sure the data on the volume(s) are blank by "dd'ing" into /dev/sdX6 Create a new raid1 array on sdX6 Do NOT update mdadm.conf <<< I believe nothing much will change here as the uuid of the underlying partition will not have changed also leaving it as it is will make sure it gets the existing /dev/md/3 slot. Make sure the array is started/synced ok. Create ext4 file system on md3 Update fstab to reflect new uuid of new file system. Re-boot system, check all is well (in theory it should be). At this point I start to go outside of mdadm but any help is much appreciated. As I don't have enough sata slots I'm going to have to do a bit of fiddling about... Get the network card firmware, place it and the iso and the hd-media files on md3's ext4 partition. re-boot and manually load/start from md3 (I believe as its raid1 it should be started ok by grub so will be accessible) the vmlinuz/initrd.gz which should then start the installation process. During the install only setup/define the md3 as / and also set the home on / (so it doesn't conflict with anything in md2's home); also set up /boot on the md0 (same as where the existing boot is located) leave all other file systems alone as will set them up once new debian is bootable. re-boot, check new install ok and / is on md3 (or what ever the new clean install has called it) re-boot, check old install is ok and is using the old / (which it should be as nothing changed as far as its concerned) re-boot to new debian, run grub-update to refresh bios boot partition on sdH reboot with removed sdG, test new and old boot's ok. reboot new install with re-attached sdG, test ok, update mdadm.conf and fstab to include all other file systems. final re-boot and test and data/application migration from old debian... finished... hopefully! Thanks in advance, JonXx -- 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
