[CentOS] deleting FakeRaid -> what happens to the partitions/data

Mon Feb 17 10:44:08 UTC 2014
Ljubomir Ljubojevic <centos at plnet.rs>

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.


-- 
Ljubomir Ljubojevic
(Love is in the Air)
PL Computers
Serbia, Europe

StarOS, Mikrotik and CentOS/RHEL/Linux consultant