Extend Software RAID

[Paul Howarth]

On Wed, 2005-07-20 at 22:10 -0400, Yanick Quirion wrote:
> I have a software RAID-5 on FC3 box using three disks and utility
> mdadm. I want to add another disk and extend my partition (ext3)
> without having to backup, re-create RAID and restore data. I want to
> do it online if it’s possible, but I’m able to unmount the partition
> if it’s necessary. At this time, I do not have LVM partition on top of
> my RAID. Do I need to create LVM partition to be able to extend the
> partition?

I think you're out of luck. "man mdadm" suggests that its "grow" support
does not yet cover using an additional drive in a RAID5 array.

If you were already using LVM then you could add the new drive as extra
space for your existing volume group and extend the partition that way,
but that would throw away the redundancy you have with your existing
RAID setup and hence wouldn't be a good idea anyway.

I think you're going to have to go down the backup, re-create RAID and
restore data route I'm afraid.

Paul.

-- 
Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org>