mdadm raid1, initialize existing drives?
Fraser Campbell
fraser-eicrhRFjby5dCsDujFhwbypxlwaOVQ5f at public.gmane.org
Sun Nov 12 11:10:03 UTC 2006
On Sunday 12 November 2006 00:41, Jamon Camisso wrote:
> Is it possible to initialize a softraid RAID-1 setup on 2 drives, one of
> which has existing data? Is it a matter of mirroring one drive to the other
> and then running mdadm or would formatting and starting from scratch be a
> better/easier option? Obviously it would be nice to not have to format...
I don't believe that it is possible. Assuming you have data on sda1 and wish
to mirror to sdb1, here are the steps I have used in the past:
* step one, make sure you have a full backup of your data on external device
* create a degraded RAID1 (single device using sdb1)
* mirror your data manually (I use tar) from sda1 to your raid device (md0
perhaps?)
* mount the raid device, reboot, etc ... whatever you wish to be confident
that your copy is intact (perhaps diff -rq)
* once you're confident that your one-legged raid is good to go bring sda1
into the fold (used to be raidhotadd, these days it's "mdadm --manage ???")
It would be good (perhaps essential?) to set the partition types on both
partitions to raid autodetect.
--
Fraser Campbell <fraser-Txk5XLRqZ6CsTnJN9+BGXg at public.gmane.org> http://www.wehave.net/
Georgetown, Ontario, Canada Debian GNU/Linux
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