[CentOS] Transition to CentOS - RAID HELP!

[John R Pierce]

On 01/17/12 1:30 PM, Ashley M. Kirchner wrote:
>       Hi Folks,
>
>       I've inherited an old RH7 system that I'd like to upgrade to
> CentOS6.1 by means of wiping it clean and doing a fresh install.
> However, the system has a software raid setup that I wish to keep
> untouched as it has data on that I must keep.  Or at the very least, TRY
> to keep.  If all else fails, then so be it and I'll just recreate the
> thing.  I do plan on backing up the data first in case of disasters.
> But I'm hoping I don't have to considering there's some 500GiB on it.
>


frankly, I'd temporarily hang a 1TB drive on that thing, format it as a 
simple volume, and backup your file systems to it, that raid is a 
*MESS*.    It would make much more sense to have 1 partition on each 
physical disk be a member of the MD raid5, then put that md in the 
volgroup, rather than having 9 sets of raids, I can only imagine they 
did it the way they did due to limitations of that ancient linux kernel 
in RH Linux 7.x (early Kernel 2.4, I believe).

but, a newer linux kernel should see those md volumes, and should be 
able to import the LVM VG on them, if you really want to keep it intact.

-- 
john r pierce                            N 37, W 122
santa cruz ca                         mid-left coast