On Thu, Oct 18, 2012 at 9:02 PM, Reindl Harald h.reindl@thelounge.net wrote:
Am 18.10.2012 17:29, schrieb Manish Kathuria:
Has anyone created or rebuilt a Linux Software RAID having mirrored partitions on unequal sized hard disks ? There is a CentOS 5 server having two 400 GB hard disks with five mirrored partitions (software RAID 1) and one of the hard disks is dying. Since new 400 GB HDDs are not available here, we are exploring the possibility of replacing the faulty hard disk with one of a higher capacity (500 GB or more). And once it is fully replicated, we plan to replace the other 400 GB HDD also with another hard disk of the same higher capacity.
Just want to know if anyone has done something similar and what are the chances of success (or data loss) ?
no problem at all
- remove the disk
- dd if=/dev/one-of-the-living/ of=/dev/new-disk/ bs=512 count=1
- reboot or bring the kernel to re-read the partition table
- rebuild the raid
the dd-trick is intented to clone the complete partition table and MBR to the new disk and the additional space is untouched
linux-software raid has no problem with different disk-sizes only the used partitions must be equal
Thanks Reindl, copying the first sector using is the simplest and foolproof way of ensuring that the exact partition table is cloned but would it also include the logical partitions ? In our case we have 5 partitions, two of which are logical ones.
-- Manish