Topic: Question about using raid to setup larger hard drive?

[SteveGrillo]

Hi everyone,

I'm new to the forum although I've been using e-smith/smeserver for years as my webserver and email server.

My old system couldn't handle the 7.0 upgrade well, so I was hoping to backup/restore to a new system.  Unfortunately I had like 7GB of data, and the restore didn't work.   Sigh...

So plan b: I took the old drive and put it into the new system and all is well.

BUT the old drive is dying.   I have a new drive that's much larger (80GB).

Here's the question:   Can I put the new drive in, turn on Raid 1 to mirror from the dying drive to the new drive, and then pull the old drive and voila, be back in business?

What I see in documentation is that the new drive should be the same size and model as the old.  But is that just good practice for mirroring, or is there really a problem upgrading the way I described?

Thanks for any help! (note I'm not a linux person, so keep it simple for me please!)

[SteveGrillo]

nobody has any idea if I can expand to a larger hard drive using the raid1 technique?

What will happen if the mirror'd drive isn't the same size or model as the main drive?

[raem]

SteveGrillo

> What will happen if the mirror'd drive isn't the same size or model as the main drive?

At best it will make a RAID array the size of the smaller drive.
It may not even work at all. sme7 release notes and FAQ specify the disk sizes must be identical.

Read the sticky post (towards the current end) about upgrading from sme6 to sme7. There is a restore from disk technique mentioned there that will allow an easy upgrade while enlarging the disk size, it should also work from sme 7 to sme7.

[SteveGrillo]

Thanks!

That would be ideal...

[SteveGrillo]

Read the sticky post (towards the current end) about upgrading from sme6 to sme7. There is a restore from disk technique mentioned there that will allow an easy upgrade while enlarging the disk size, it should also work from sme 7 to sme7.

Thanks Ray.

Can you point me to the one you're talking about?  I'm seeing various tools mentioned, and I don't want to go down the wrong (or more difficult) path (I'm REALLY not a linux person - more of a PC dude).

Thanks in advance...

[raem]

SteveGrillo

> Can you point me to the one you're talking about?  

It's the second Topic in the SME Server 7.x forum, see page 4, but read the whole thread for good background info.

[SteveGrillo]

SteveGrillo

> Can you point me to the one you're talking about?  

It's the second Topic in the SME Server 7.x forum, see page 4, but read the whole thread for good background info.

Thanks Ray,

It's the one with the 17 steps.  Now I see why you didn't simply link to the post - you can't!  (I'm used to other forums where this is done all the time).

Turns out because I was getting desperate, I killed 2 birds with one stone and solved it myself.   And at the same time I finally got off the webmail "habit" I've had when consulting for the last 4 years (I'm now back in my normal office), and moved to Eudora.  With some pain and suffering I was able to transfer over 15000 archived emails in about 20 folders from webmail over to eudora and get them off the server.   Then I temporarily moved some website stuff offline.  

Then I was able to do the backup, and restore to the new hard drive just fine.

Thanks for helping out Ray.

[sages]

i've done harddrive replacement and partition changes using the following
to copy the hardrive to a new drive http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/
and

to resize the partition
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/index.php

i used the live cd version of each of them

for some reason i couldn't get the drive to boot when using gpartd to copy the partitions to a new drive, so i used g4u to clone the drive and then gpartd to resize the partitions on it as required.

there are probably easier ways to do it but it worked for me

[SteveGrillo]

i've done harddrive replacement and partition changes using the following
to copy the hardrive to a new drive http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/
and

to resize the partition
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/index.php

i used the live cd version of each of them

for some reason i couldn't get the drive to boot when using gpartd to copy the partitions to a new drive, so i used g4u to clone the drive and then gpartd to resize the partitions on it as required.

there are probably easier ways to do it but it worked for me

Thanks - that's good info (if not for me, for someone else!).