Topic: Raid 1

[Agent86]

Hi all,

First let me say that I've read the HOWTO's extensively, and all links in the HOWTO's regarding RAID, also all HOWTO's regarding AddExtraHardDisk;and searched the forums,FAQ's,manual and google regarding this subject. Now that I've gotten that out of the way here is the question.

There does not appear to be anything in any of these sources which indicates replacing a bad drive with same size good drive

I realize this perhaps may be elementary for the new drive to just sync up at least thats what I assume since there is no mention of this fact, but if you have a bad drive or have a problem in which the drive does not just simply add itself back to the RAID, then one will begin to look to the FAQ's,HOWTO's to find out how to do it or why it didn't go smoothly.
For example: If you have a RAID1 with 2 IDE drives on separate channels of course. And you get a degraded array, and of course followling the HOWTO's regarding rebuilding or adding the partition back to Raid which may have gotten out of sync etc.
Lets say the bad drive is hda 1 your current first/boot drive. If you replace that with a new drive, will the machine boot to the second drive hdc ? Or do you set the bios to boot to the second hdc drive to start your redundency ? Or do you put the old second drive hdc in the primary master position and now becomes hda and install the new drive as hdc ?

All these questions would easily be avoided if someplace it just says replace the old drive with new drive and be sure that you have either formated the drive to ext3 or perhaps simply unallocated partition or something and the drive should automatically sync up. And if it does not then you have to follow these steps: 1,2,3

Or if you have to put the new drive in hdc, then it should identify that replacing old dead drives needs to move your hardware around to repair your array.

I know the HOWTO mentions some configuration for installing larger drives or upgrading to large drives,and I guess it's assumed that this might be or should be the procedure for replacing the old dead drive of same size, however when and if the drive does not sync up then a person will also assume they did something wrong and then the bunch of questions because the HOWTO does not specifically identify replacement of dead drives and hardware configuration or reconfiguration if needed.

I'd be happy to experiment some more to write a HOWTO that will identify some of these questions and answers when in doubt.

Also what about upgrading hard drives from IDE to SATA,I was considering installing a SATA drive and was considering a sync to the IDE drive, then install the SATA in a new system and install second SATA drive and sync and do away with the IDE drives.
Can an IDE drive sync to a SATA drive in order to prepare to replace all IDE drive to SATA drives ?

And what about 3 IDE drives ? Of course not desired to have 2 drives on same channel, but can it be done to have more redundancies?

?
1.IDE master
2.IDE slave
3.IDE master
4.CD rom

And still RAID 1 ? or something else ?

[CharlieBrady]

Hi all,
All these questions would easily be avoided if someplace it just says replace the old drive with new drive and be sure that you have either formated the drive to ext3 or perhaps simply unallocated partition or something and the drive should automatically sync up. And if it does not then you have to follow these steps: 1,2,3

If you think anything should be changed in the software or in the documentation, you should just use the Bug Tracker to suggest it.