Hi all, Over the past couple of months I have been looking into upgrading the drives in one of our servers, a PE2850 running CentOS 4.8. Currently it has 3x146GB 10K drives, two of which are RAID1 and the third being a hot spare.
I would like to upgrade the drives to 3x300GB 15K drives but I do not want to reinstall the OS. I have found many articles on the web related to upgrading RAID1 configurations and it seems like everyone says the following: 1) Create a Ghost image of OS/data, etc. for backup. 2) Break the array (degrade it). 3) Pull one of the drives (drive 1) and replace it with the newer 300GB drive. 4) Let the array rebuild to the bigger drive. 5) Pull drive 0 and replace it with the newer 300GB drive. 6) Let the array rebuild. 7) Use gParted or another partition resizing program to increase my partitions. or 1) Create a Ghost image of OS/data, etc. for backup and restore. 2) Turn off the server and replace both drives with the newer 300GB drives. 3) Turn on the server and create a new RAID1 array. 4) Restore the Ghost image from step 1. 5) Use gParted or another partition resizing program to increase my partitions. However, no one has confirmed that these methods worked for them. Now, both ways sound like they would work, but I am extremely nervous about this because I have also found forum postings and articles about having to manually copy over partition information, and that disk block sizes matter, etc. (not exactly sure about the technical issues here), etc. This is also a mission critical production server so uptime is key. So my question is, are either of the two methods above realistic, and/or has anyone actually upgraded RAID1 in a PE2850 or PE server before without having to reinstall their OS? Thanks, Ray _______________________________________________ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list [email protected] https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
