Kai Schaetzl spake the following on 6/9/2006 9:31 AM: > Scott Silva wrote on Thu, 08 Jun 2006 09:29:12 -0700: > >> Pardon my chiming in, > > why should I take offense? Thanks! > > but this is an adequate way to copy the partition data, >> and that is what I used on my software raid systems. Don't forget that the >> first part is sfdisk -d, not just sfdisk -. > > Yeah, my typing! Thanks for the confirmation, I'll put it in my basket of > valuable snippets. > >>> the pulled out one. I didn't test dropping one of the disks in the middle >>> of operation yet. >> Don't do that! Don't test by pulling a running disk unless it is in hotplug >> capable hardware. Test by using mdadm to remove that drive. > > That's not a real test ;-) I can test out and learn quite a few things by less > harmful ways but I don't know what happens if I rip it out in the middle of > operation. After all, that's what's going to happen when it really fails. I did > it already once and the drive survived, I'll do it again. I use two old 10 GB > drives for testing. I'd regret if I lost one of them since after that I have > only *very* old drives for further testing, but it's not a real problem. > >> >>> There are two things I realized: >>> >>> 1. disks need to run on different IDE controllers it seems. >> That info is in the software raid howto. Some systems are more tolerant than >> others, but usually a failed drive will lock the entire channel, so the >> primary and the slave would go down. > > Yeah, I didn't read that part of the how-to I guess. On a non-testing machine I > wouldn't have put the drives on one channel, anyway, but in this case it was the > easiest and fastest option. And I learned something from that :-) Actually, they > didn't go down both, but the bootup failed. There was a whole lot of IDE errors > on the console, though, after I pulled the cable. > > Kai > Actually, a failed drive will time out and error, but yanking it out while running could "potentially" create a spike that could theoretically kill the entire machine. Why don't you at least get a couple of removable ide trays with keylocks. The run about $10 US each, and turning the key will just kill the power to the drive, and not do more damage. -- MailScanner is like deodorant... You hope everybody uses it, and you notice quickly if they don't!!!!