[CentOS] Growing RAID5 on CentOS 4.6

Fri Aug 22 19:21:51 UTC 2008
Stephen Harris <lists at spuddy.org>

On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 03:05:30PM -0400, Ross S. W. Walker wrote:
> Stephen Harris wrote:

> Or you could just boot from a LiveCD of a distro that was this and
> run a conversion there, it would make it unavailable during the
> conversion though.

*grin*  My first email on this subject...
  
  I wonder if I could boot off a Ubuntu CD or something and grow the array
  that way.  Would be annoying (many hours of server downtime)...


> If the array was part of a LVM VG, you could create another 4 drive
> array and add it to the VG and extend the LVs that way, or do a
> pvmove and move everything from the old array to the new.

Well, it _is_...  the old array was 4*500Gb.  The new array is 5*1Tb.
In each I've built a single VG/LV.  But my machine can't handle 9 SATA
disks (power, controller limitations, space).  So what I did was use one
of the TByte disks to copy the data, built the other 4 into an array,
copied the data from the last disk onto the array and then... failed to
extend the array.

I still have the old 4*500GB on a shelf, but I don't have anything I can
plug it into.

(My other option is to buy a couple of SATA controllers, build a second
machine then transfer data over the network)

-- 

rgds
Stephen