Re: Spares and partitioning huge disks

On Thursday 06 January 2005 19:30, Mike Hardy wrote:

maarten wrote:

quoted

I was planning to do this quickly tonight, but I've overlooked one
essential thing ;-|  The old server has already 220 GB of data built of 4
80GB disks in raid-5.  But I cannot connect all 8 disks at the same time,
so I'll have to 'free up' another system to define the arrays and copy
the data over Gbit LAN.  I definitely don't want to lose the data!
What complicates this a bit is that I wanted to copy the OS verbatim (it
is not part of that raid-5 set, just raid-1). But I suppose booting a
rescue CD would enable me to somehow netcat the OS over to the new
disks... We'll see.

You could degrade the current raid5 set by plugging one of the new
drives in and copying the 220GB to it directly, then you could build the
new raid5 sets with one drive "missing" and then finally dump the data
on the new raid5's and then hotadd the missing drive

Hey.  I knew that trick of course, but only now that you mention it I realize 
that indeed one single new disk is big enough to hold all of the old data.
Stupid :)  I never though of that.  Go figure.  Those disks get BIG indeed...!
:-))

Right now I took my main(*) fileserver offline, unplugged all the disks from 
it and connected the new disks.  Using a RIP CDrom I partitioned them and 
'mkraid'ed (mdadm not yet being on RIP) the first md device which will hold 
the OS.  As we speak the netcat session is running, so if I didn't make any 
typos or thinkos soon I will hopefully reboot to a full-fledged system.

(*) These new disks are not for my _fileserver_, but for my MythTV PVR, the 
machine they will eventually end up in, which holds the 220 GB TV & movies.

So far, so good...

Maarten

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