On 4/20/2022 3:55 AM, Roman Mamedov wrote:
On Wed, 20 Apr 2022 03:40:12 -0500
Leslie Rhorer <lesrhorer@xxxxxxx> wrote:
I have run into a little problem. I know of a couple of ways to fix it
by shutting down the system and physically taking it apart, but for
various reasons I don't wish to take that route. I want to be able to
re-arrange the system with it running.
The latest version (bullseye) of Debian will not complete its upgrade
properly because my /boot file system is a little too small. I have two
bootable drives with three partitions on them. The first partition on
each drive is assembled into a RAID1 as /dev/md1 mounted as /boot. Once
the system is booted, these can of course easily be umounted, the RAID1
stopped, and there is then no problem increasing the size of the
partitions if there were space to be had. The third partition on each
drive is assigned as swap, and of course it was easy to resize those
partitions, leaving an additional 512MB between the second and third
partitions on each drive. All I need to do is move the second partition
on each drive up by 512MB.
The problem is the second partition on both drives is also assembled
into a RAID1 array on /dev/md2, formatted as ext4 and mounted as /. Is
there a way I can move the RAID1 array up without shutting down the
system? I don't need to resize the array, just move it.
You could fail one half of the RAID1, remove it, recreate the partition at the
required offset, add the new partition into the array and let it rebuild. Then
repeat with the other half.
However during that process you do not have the redundancy protection, so in
case the remaining array drive fails or has a bad sector, it could become
tricky to recover.
Maybe run a bad block scan, or "smartctl -t long" on the disks first. And of
course have a backup.
Hmm. I hadn't thought of that. Well, of course I thought of the
backup. I'm not insane. The boot drives are SSDs, and they are not all
that big. The /dev/md2 array is only 88G, so there isn't much exposure
to drive failure. Rebuilding won't take long. Thanks.
