Hi
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 - deleting all meta data from partitions - deleting all dmraid packages
is the data still available on the drives, i.e. the partitions, filesystem and files are still ok?
I know that FakeRAID controller is not a real hardware controller and the driver (thus CPU doing the work) makes it look like one drive ...
So if you create a partition it would be a standard (and same) partition on each of the drive connected to a FakeRAID?
This would me there are just normal drives with partitions and file system that is ready to be used after the deletion of the faeRAID?
thanks Jobst
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.
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.
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Jobst Schmalenbach -
John R Pierce -
Ljubomir Ljubojevic