On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 03:21:51PM -0400, Stephen Harris wrote:
I wonder if I could boot off a Ubuntu CD or something and grow the array that way. Would be annoying (many hours of server downtime)...
In the end I booted a CentOS 5.2 DVD in "rescue" mode. This appears to have improved since 5.0 because that version threw up lots of I/O errors (which is why I ran 4.x, which worked fine).
Once I loaded the modules in the right order I was able to grow the RAID5. It took around 25 hours. But, oddly, after the build the 5th disk was taken offline. The remaining 4 disks correctly maintained the data.
So then I rebooted back to the main build, re-added the disk, resized the PV, extended the LV, resized the FS. And now...
% df -hP /Media Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/Raid5-Media 3.6T 1.3T 2.4T 35% /Media
The RAID is still rebuilding. In another 5 hours I should know if it's worked properly!