On Thu, Oct 18, 2012 at 9:02 PM, Reindl Harald <h.reindl at 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