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RAID 1 rebuild to larger drives

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Vain

IS-IT--Management
Apr 7, 2006
2
CA
I recently had a drive in a RAID1 array fail. Luckily, both drives were under warrantee, so I got them both replaced with larger ones as the failed drive is no longer manufactured.

Running an Adaptec 2100s, the rebuild was simple - pull the failed drive, put in a good one, wait. Then I pulled the good old drive, swapped in the new larger drive, and rebuilt again.

Problem is of course that I'm not getting the extra capacity of the drives as the array table still has info about the smaller drives. Is there anyway to change the array table so that I can make use of the unused space, or will I have to put back in the old drive, zap the array table, set up a new array, and copy back?
 
The most expedient course to do what you want, with the least complications would be:

Back up the drive array information.

Break/disable the array, so that you now have 2 SATA drives.

for illustration:
drive '0' your boot drive with OS & data(small partition)
drive '1' that is now separate

Reformat drive '1' as a single volume full capacity

Image drive '0' to drive '1' (acronis true image, Ghost or drive utils) as a new boot drive.

swap drive '0' with drive '1' boot the pc to new drive.

perform reformat of the other drive as a single volume

re-enter adaptec raid setup and define your raid array amking the appropriate selections.



rvnguy
"I know everything..I just can't remember it all
 
Thanks for the advice. I did try something on my own today seeing as no one was in for the holiday. Incidentally, the 's' in 2100s stands for SCSI, not SATA.

1) Mirrored back to the remaining good drive just so I'd have a backup if I did something catastrophic.

2) Zapped the RAID table on one of the new drives and both RAID and partition tables on the other

3) Created a new RAID1 - luckily this card let's you create the RAID without destroying data, and mirrors whichever drive you choose to the other.

This left me with the full capacity of the drives. The rest is Linux specific, using parted to enlarge the extended partition, fdisk to create another partition, tune2fs to convert to ext3 and make some other changes, cp -pr * . from one of the old partitions to the new one, and manually editting fstab to mount the new and renamed partitions.

Result, I now have a data partition nearly three times the size of the one it replaced, and a massive dedicated /var/spool/mail partition so that some of my sillier users can't plug up the /var filesystem with ridiculously large emails.
 
Thanks for posting Back with your solution.

Steps same for SATA or SCSI and it seems that you got this sorted out. Adaptec does provide one of the better implementations as you found out.

Wish you would have stated that you were on Linux up front.

rvnguy
"I know everything..I just can't remember it all
 
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