I had great difficulty finding info. on how to convert from RAID-0 to linear and then grow the system.
I have since found out, and am documenting the details here in case others have similar needs. My setup (for the compelte debian mirror at debian.fapeal.br) was 2 80 Gb disks on separate controllers, running RAID-0. This gave me about 150 Gb on /dev/md0 but the Debian mirror now needs more space. I bought one more disk of 120 Gb but I needed to switch from RAID-0 to linear, since with 3 disks raid-0 makes no sense if you have only 2 controllers. This is what ended up working: 1. copy the data from RAID-0 /dev/md0 to the new disk, on an ext2 fs. the disk cannot become 100% full, leave some empty space. 2. then, destroy the old RAID-0 system by running mke2fs 3. edit /etc/raidtab to remove the old md0 device 4. edit raidtab to include a new raid linear device. The new disk should be the 1st disk, and the old (former RAID-0) disks can be 2 and 3. 5. create a new raid linear device, with persistent superblock, using mkraid -f. You will have to use --really-force and you will get a nasty warning about your data being lost. Just sit tight and ignore the warning. 6. The new raid device will have the full size of the 3 (or more) disks concatenated. However, the existing fs will still be in place, so that after fsck and mounting, df will show a total size only of the 1st disk. the full md device size will not be accessible. Your old data will still be there. 7. so after runnign fsck, run resize2fs /dev/md0 (or other device) and the fs size will expand to include the full space. No data will be lost. I tested this and it works (and my mirror will be back online soon I hope). Of course, make backups, etc. (IN my case this was not possible due to the sheer size and my limited resources). There are other methods, like mke2fs -S, but of all the methods I tested, this one is the best method for growing a raid-linear device. -gandhi -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
