move entire 507 system to new disk

[adumitrescu]

Hello,
I have SCO 5.0.7 installed on a RAID5 system (Intel SATA SRCS14L, 4 disks). I need to reconfigure this array to RAID10 for better performance (I know I'll lose some useable disk space - doesn't matter). System does not have a tape drive.

The process I'm considering is as follows:
- install IDE disk big enough to hold everything
- copy everything on RAID5 array to IDE disk
- reconfigure array to RAID10
- copy everything on IDE back to new RAID10

My question is "what is the best method" to do all this coping? I looked at "True Image" by Acronis, but I don't think this will see the array controller since it's not standard SCSI or IDE.
What about tar and cpio? I would be concerned about missing special files. Also, doing a 'file-level copy' would not copy the boot sector stuff to the IDE, then back to the new array.
I suspect I'm faced with a fresh install of SCO507 in the newly created RAID10, then copy back all the files from the IDE 'backup'. I hope someone has gone down this road and has advice-tips (besides "don't do it!").
-thanks

 

[apeasecpc]

You can't copy the disk image because the file systems of your IDE, RAID5 and RAID10 will each be a different size.

I expect you will at least have to do a minimum install on the RAID10 to get it bootable. After that you may be able to overwrite everything with an appropriate "copy" command from the IDE back to the RAID10. Whether or not this will work depend's on how much the filesystem sizes changed, and whether any device node numbers changed.

 

[adumitrescu]

Thanks for the reply.
Indeed you cannot copy a running system to/from dissimilar disk hardware. Heck, if one single parameter of the disk system (i.e. geometry) has changed, there is a good chance your kernel will panic. The SCO Openserver kernel is *very* annoying in that it wants to rebuild and relink for the tiniest of hardware changes.
After I posted my initial question, I did a TON more research and it became very obvious that the only intelligent course of action was a clean reinstall of the O/S. This is what I did.

It was time consuming, but I'm now done AND the server is performing much better with disk I/Os.

Cheers.