Topic: Problem with RAID installation

[ElFroggio]

I had an SME 7 server with an external USB drive for the backups. I first did a backup of all the data to the external USB drive and replaced the internal drive with a larger brand new drive. I did the SME8 install, it was slower than I expected and then when it was time to restore the data from the external backup I realized that SME wiped the external drive and made it part of the raid 1 array (big oops).

To make a long story short:

How do I break the array and remove the external drive from the raid to make it back to a backup drive?

Thanks

[janet]

ElFroggio

I think this should work.
Unplug the USB drive and restart the server, then reconnect the USB drive and it should now have been spat out of the array. Follow the USB Disk Howto and reformat the USB drive, being very careful to format the correct drive.

If you really want to be careful or cautious, do the reformatting on a test Linux server.

As you know now, always remove the USB drive before swapping, moving or changing disks on sme server.

[ElFroggio]

I think this should work.
Unplug the USB drive and restart the server, then reconnect the USB drive and it should now have been spat out of the array.

I once (years ago on CentOS 3) removed the second drive of the array without replacing the second drive, it worked, but MDADM kept on complaining with thousand of error messages in the log.

Code: [Select]

mdadm --manage /dev/mdfoo --fail /dev/sdfoo
mdadm --manage /dev/mdfoo --remove /dev/sdfoo
mdadm --manage --stop /dev/mdfoo
Would that work? or is there any e-smith template that need to be modified?

Thanks

[janet]

ElFroggio

I assumed you would replace the USB drive with another internal SATA (if that's what you are using) drive, and then manually rebuild the array using the Console admin menu, where you add an unused drive to the array. I'm assuming here too, that you are referring to a RAID1 setup with two drives only.

Of course you can continue on in degraded mode with one drive in the RAID1 array, but you will continue to get those messages, so you may then need to disable the generation of those messages ie disable the raid monitor function.

Refer to the RAID Howto, it has various useful commands.