On 02/17/2014 06:21 AM, John R Pierce wrote:
On 2/16/2014 8:26 PM, Jobst Schmalenbach wrote:
A server has FakeRAID installed, I want to remove it to make it mdadm driven ....
If I delete the FakeRAID including
- disabling it in the BIOS
- removing the dmraid driver from initrd
the dmraid driver is really not functionally different than the mdraid driver, except it supports the Intel fake-raid metadata so the BIOS can treat the volume like a raid too.
I had one instance where I nedded to use dmraid -r -E /dev/sdX to clean disk. As far as I remember, partitions were not deleted, it's just metadata.
Quick online search for "dmraid -r -E" never mentions data loss neither, so you should be fine.
BUT, if you can, backup would be preferable for any live work with important data, and "sfdisk -d /dev/sdX > partition.txt" will save partition info so if anything goes wrong you can reapply it.