Will setting up RAID will destroy the OS?

[splitbrain]

Hi,

I ordered a second hard disk and connected it via eSATA to my B3. My aim is to setup a RAID mirror. However, choosing this option from the administration interface warns me that I will loose all data on the internal hard disk. Since my B3 is new, that's no problem I don't have much data on it, yet and can easily back it up. But I'm wondering about the operating system...

Here are my questions:

1) Will the OS be destroyed by preparing the RAID?
2) Will the OS be mirrored once the RAID is working?
3) Is there some documentation on how to recover the RAID when the internal, not the external disk dies?

Andi

[RandomUsername]

1. I don't believe so.

2. No, it only mirrors the storage partition.

3. Yes there is somewhere. I don't have RAID so I wasn't paying attention but I think there are instructions in the original manual the B2 shipped with (as opposed to the light-weight one newer versions come with). I think you can still download the original pdf somewhere from the Excito site.

[pcrene]

Hello

I used RAID on my 2 B2. But when activating the RAID the /home is emtied...

Rene

[Magnus]

Hi Andy,
1. Creating a RAID will destroy all user data. The Linux installation on your internal HD will not be touched.

2. The OS will not be mirrored. The Linux installation will only exist on the internal HD in B3.

3. We are working on a B3 manual, but in the mean time have a look in the Bubba|2 manual, the information is correct but the screen dumps are not: http://download.excito.net/web/BubbaTwo ... /raid.html

BR
Magnus

[Ubi]

If this thing is software raid, it's actually not difficult of moving to RAID without destroying the content of the partition. You just need some lowlevel hacking of the partition table and a manual edit of /etc/mdstat

[RichoDemus]

Sorry to bump this thread but I figured it better to ask my question here than to create a new, nearly identical question

I know the instructions say that "all user data" will be removed, but can anyone confirm if /home (and subdirectories) is the only directory that will be emptied?, running df gives me:


3:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 9.9G 1.6G 7.9G 17% /
tmpfs 252M 0 252M 0% /lib/init/rw
udev 10M 144K 9.9M 2% /dev
tmpfs 252M 4.0K 252M 1% /dev/shm
/dev/mapper/bubba-storage
907G 8.8G 852G 2% /home

which makes me think that it is true that only /home will be cleared, but I want to be sure before I do anything stupid

Thanks for reading!

[pcrene]

Yes its true.

Rene

[RichoDemus]

Thank you for the swift reply!

[grndvl1]

By the way how long does it take to setup the RAID and let it run? Mines been going for 3 hours and I can't ping the B3 yet, used to be able to before the I started the raid setup from the interface. Will it reboot back to normal once its done?

[RichoDemus]

How big are your drives? I added a 1TB drive to the already existing 1TB drive and I think it took less than an hour to get it working

[grndvl1]

I have 2TB drives...I left it running overnight and it never rebooted so I rebooted and was able to connect but lost everything in home too and then had some weird errors in the webpages too. Only way I fixed it was to reinstall the whole image. I will try the RAID again but only if I can figure a way for home not to be destroyed.

[RichoDemus]

I don't know if it's possible to set up a disk RAID without formating the home partition, I just made a giant tarball of my entire home directory and moved it to my workstation and then moved it back when the raid was done

[nobody]

Yes it's possible but not via the web interface. It's a five minute job really, yet not suitable for the faint-hearted

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO.html
https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/
http://www.howtoforge.com/software-raid ... ebian-etch