On Thu, 16 Sep 1999, John Walker wrote:
> James,
>
> Thanks for a (mostly) clean step by step! I used this for an
> installation I had and I was fairly pleased with the results. However I
> got a little confused by your use of "old" and "new" in steps 4, 6, and
> 8.
>
Ah, mabe I'l re-visit it.... by old I referred to the raw device volume
which you copy from onto the half mirror... by new I referred to the newly
created md device.
> The result was that whenever I rebooted I had to raidhotadd the "failed"
> disk. Is there any change I must make to /etc/raidtab to make the mirror
> set come up automatically at boot time? (Otherwise I leave a line that
> says "failed" in my raidtab?)
>
raidtab is ONLY used to create the volume in mkraid, not afterwards.....
the most probable cause is that the partition type has not been set to FD
for the second disk.
>
> I guess the real question is, would you take mercy on us and expand upon
> your recipie for those non-cooks out here?
>
I don't see any reason NOT to. Once I get time I'll look at it again.
> One other question: is there any reason not to use this method to create
> a raid AFTER you have populated all the partitions on one disk of the
> set?
If I read you right, in that you are using a disk and want to mirror
it.... then yes this would work... you are creating a NEW volume and
copying the files to it!
>
> In case you couldn't guess, for reasons totally unrelated to RAID I had
> to do a total reinstall of a production server and there wasn't time to
> setup the raid again. Now I want to go back and set it up, while the box
> is live. (Foolish or brave?)
>
I think brave, but not necessarily foolish, because the NEW volume has ALL
the data as well as the old, and you'll boot the machine onto the new
volume before erasing the old.
BACKUP the data! and have a copy of the kernel on a floppy!
> John Walker
>
A.J. ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Sometimes you're ahead, somtimes you're behind.
The race is long, and in the end it's only with yourself.
