Impotence
July 23rd, 2008, 09:10 PM
I have been putting this off for a month, due to worrying too much about doing it wrong... i would appreciate it if someone would take me through this step by step.
Distribution
Kubuntu 8.04 KDE4 remix (x86)
Hardware
3 x 500GB SATA drives (sdc,sdd and sde) [unformatted, unmounted] to be RAID 5'd.
1 x 500GB SATA drive (sdb) [ext3, /home, 99% full] for a hot spare.
The hot spare drive cannot be added until the array has been built as i do not have anywhere to store its contents (and the raid has been tested to death, I'm not wanting to loose 430GB of data!)
What i have done so far
Tied up SATA data & power cables to stop them from moving
Used hot glue to prevent sata data & power connectors from coming lose from HDD / Motherboard
Installed mdadm
What i need to do (help!)
Create the RAID
Setup RAID monitoring [audible alarm if a disk dies]
create a lvm on it
format the lvm (Suggestions? something journaled?)
Create test data on the RAID (a copy of /home)
Selectively drop individual disks out of the array (can't unplug them, dban them?) and learn to rebuild it.
when i am confident that it is 'stable' mount it as /home
Add the old /home disk (sdb) to the array as a hot spare
Possibly use sdb to make a 1.5TB raid once i have filled 1TB (for future reference)
Questions
If i change distribution / when i do a clean install, how do i mount the raid? what files (if any) do i have to have a copy of to do it (such as the mdadm config file?)
Distribution
Kubuntu 8.04 KDE4 remix (x86)
Hardware
3 x 500GB SATA drives (sdc,sdd and sde) [unformatted, unmounted] to be RAID 5'd.
1 x 500GB SATA drive (sdb) [ext3, /home, 99% full] for a hot spare.
The hot spare drive cannot be added until the array has been built as i do not have anywhere to store its contents (and the raid has been tested to death, I'm not wanting to loose 430GB of data!)
What i have done so far
Tied up SATA data & power cables to stop them from moving
Used hot glue to prevent sata data & power connectors from coming lose from HDD / Motherboard
Installed mdadm
What i need to do (help!)
Create the RAID
Setup RAID monitoring [audible alarm if a disk dies]
create a lvm on it
format the lvm (Suggestions? something journaled?)
Create test data on the RAID (a copy of /home)
Selectively drop individual disks out of the array (can't unplug them, dban them?) and learn to rebuild it.
when i am confident that it is 'stable' mount it as /home
Add the old /home disk (sdb) to the array as a hot spare
Possibly use sdb to make a 1.5TB raid once i have filled 1TB (for future reference)
Questions
If i change distribution / when i do a clean install, how do i mount the raid? what files (if any) do i have to have a copy of to do it (such as the mdadm config file?)