Hi Guys & Gals,
I have a server running Ubuntu Lucid 10.04. It has 2 sata disks running as RAID level 1 (simple mirror) using MDADM.
Recently there's been an error on 1 of the disks. After a reboot, the raid array resynchronised itself, but I'm taking this as a warning and an excuse to replace the disks.
I have several questions. First of which is, is MDADM still the way to go? I seem to remember reading that you can set up RAID 1 with just using ext4. Presumably MADAM is still the best.
Next, my original partitioning scheme was one / (root) raid device with partition, and one swap raid device swap with partition.
I presume that a better layout would be to have / (root), home and swap raid devices with partitions.
Should I be using LVM as well, or just shove a partition directly on the raid device?
I don't want to do a fresh install, I want to copy the data over from the old disk to the new ones. What's the best way of going about this? I can only have 2 drives connected at a time, but I could put the new disks into a spare computer and transfer files over the network if necessary.
I'm hoping that I may be able to get away with this: Using the appropriate raid controls, remove the "faulty" drive from the raid array, then physically remove it. Then physically mount one new, bigger drive. Create 3 raid partitions on the and format one as / (root) and one as swap, leaving the other one empty for a bit. Using the appropriate raid controls, mount the new devices and let them synch. Unmount and remove the remaining old drive. Mount, partition then add the new drive to the raid. Let it synch.
Once that's all happened, boot from a live cd, mount the devices, format the spare partition as "home", copy (move) files from the home directory to the new home partition.
Would this work? Or is there a better way?
Any comments appreciated. Steve