Creating Soft-RAID of existing installation

[Thomas Widhalm]

Hi!

>
> i would like to mirror my existing FC4-installation. I already added a
> second harddisk and created partitions of the same size as my running
> system-disk is.
>
> what to do next?

I've never done it myself, but I asked a really experienced systems manager 
about the same thing: Use mdadm to create software- raids on the new(!) 
harddisk with raid-level 1 and just 1 disk per raid and copy all the data 
form your old to your new disk. 

Then install grub on the new disk, shutdown your box and switch the disks on 
the buses (or try starting the system with just the new one). Your system 
should boot the new disk (don't forget to set grub and fstab to use your raid 
as root- partition) If all comes up alright, erase the old disk and hotadd 
the now empty partitions to the raids.

This should do the job. :-)

But Ir would really advise you to start and test your system with just the new 
disk, leaving the old one outside. And be aware that you should backup your 
data before this operation and don't hesitate to ask, if anything is unclear. 
Otherwise you could destroy your system.

Greetings,
Thomas

>
> how to mirror the running system?
>
> thanks a lot,
> christian

-- 
Thomas Widhalm
University of Salzburg
IT- Services, ITS

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