Topic: No Spare

[JonA]

Hi All

After more than 4 years of version 6 sitting in the corner gently humming to it's self I have run out of room on my 'old' SME server, so I have version 7.3 and have installed it on a Dell Optiplex GX1 with 3 old 40 Gig drives in it to replace it, now it has installed as advertised I think (not sure how to check the drives) and synchronized the three old drives successfully (including old Windoze installations) but I want to use all three disks without a hot spare (RAID 5), it's the data repository for my house so I can't see the need for a hot spare and I want the extra space.

I could look for some more IDE drives to fit in this old chassis but it's taken ages to fill two 40Gig drives up in the old server (RAID1) so a bit more will probably be enough to last until I need to buy some more new kit and retire my desktop to back up server role.

I want to shift the data on the old server to the new one and then retire that server to spares status (I hope it's not listening).

So the question I have is, how do I actually go about doing the 'No Spare' thing? I have looked in the manual and how to guides but apart from one reference I can't find explicit instructions on what I'm doing.

Bit of a back handed compliment, but I know so little about this system because it just keeps going, which means that I'm lost as where to start!

Cheers Jon.

[pfloor]

Your subject line is almost what you need

Install SME using the "nospare" option.  IOW, right after booting to the CD, instead of pressing "Enter" type "sme nospare" and then press enter.  Look at the Raid page in the wiki and most notably here:

http://wiki.contribs.org/Raid#nospare

[JonA]

Smashing, that worked a treat.

Thank you for your help.

Cheers Jon.