[PLUG] Linux RAID1 question

[Carlos Konstanski]

On Mon, 2 Nov 2009, Paul Heinlein wrote:

> Date: Mon, 2 Nov 2009 09:37:23 -0800 (PST)
> From: Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com>
> Reply-To: "General Linux/UNIX discussion and help;	civil and on-topic"
>     <plug at lists.pdxlinux.org>
> To: "General Linux/UNIX discussion and help;	civil and on-topic"
>     <plug at lists.pdxlinux.org>
> Subject: Re: [PLUG] Linux RAID1 question
> 
> On Mon, 2 Nov 2009, Joe Pruett wrote:
>
>>> Is it possible to take an ordinary, non-RAIDed hard drive, and turn
>>> it into a mirror without losing any data, using linux software
>>> RAID?
>>
>> i'm assuming you have one disk with data and one spare.  the safe
>> way is to create a broken mirror with the spare drive and "missing"
>> as the other piece.  then copy all the data from the current drive
>> to the mirror. then reboot off the mirror and add the original drive
>> to the mirror so it can resync.  this involves lots of fdisk, mdadm,
>> tar/rsync/cp, etc. so you really need to know what you're doing.
>
> E.g.,
>
>   http://djlab.com/2009/05/convert-single-disk-to-raid-on-live-linux-server/
>
> -- 
> Paul Heinlein <> heinlein at madboa.com <> http://www.madboa.com/

Thank you, this worked great. RAID built successfully. Copying the
data via tar was a little weird; I used rsync.

Carlos