At Thu, 10 Dec 2009 09:39:25 -0600 CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:
I have CentOS 4.x installed on a single 500GB SATA drive. Drive is about 10 percent used. I would like to migrate to software RAID 5 without reinstalling the OS. Was thinking 3 500GB drives. Is that possible or must I reinstall?
If you can install 4 drives, eg you have 4 bays and 4 SATA connections, yes, it is easy. Just install the three new drives (to SATA port 2, 3, and 4), create the RAID-5 array (actually you'll need one small RAID-1 array for /boot, so you'll create two RAID sets: a small RAID-1 for /boot and the rest for the RAID-5) and copy everything over. You'll need to re-install grub (using grub-install) and then shutdown the machine and move the drive connectors around so that the new drives are 1, 2, and 3, and the old drive is 4 (or remove it completely), and start the machine up. You can then add the original drive as a hot spare disk (or not).
Matt _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos