On Jun 2, 2010, at 12:03 PM, zfsnoob4 <zfsnoob...@hotmail.co.uk> wrote:
Wow thank you very much for the clear instructions.
And Yes, I have another 120GB drive for the OS, separate from A, B
and C. I will repartition the drive and install Solaris. Then maybe
at some point I'll delete the entire drive and just install a single
OS.
I have a question about step 6, "Step 6: create a "dummy" drive as a
sparse file: mkfile -n 1500G /foo"
I understand that I need to create a dummy drive and then immediatly
remove it to run the raidz in degraded mode. But by creating the
file with mkfile, will it allocate the 1.5TB right away on the OS
drive? I was wondering because my OS drive is only 120GB, so won't
it have a problem with creating a 1.5TB sparse file?
There is one potential pitfall in this method, if your Windows mirror
is using dynamic disks, you can't access a dynamic disk with the NTFS
driver under Solaris.
To get around this create a basic NTFS partition on the new third
drive, copy the data to that drive and blow away the dynamic mirror.
Then build the degraded raidz pool out of the two original mirror
disks and copy the data back off the new third disk on to the raidz,
then wipe the disk labels off that third drive and resilver the raidz.
A safer approach is to get a 2GB eSATA drive (a mirrored device to be
extra safe) and copy the data there, then build a complete raidz and
copy the data off the eSATA device to the raidz.
The risk and time it takes to copy data on to a degraded raidz isn't
worth it. The write throughput on a degraded raidz will be horrible
and the time it takes to copy the data over plus the time it takes in
the red zone where it resilvers the raidz with no backup available...
There is a high potential for tears here.
Get an external disk for your own sanity.
-Ross
_______________________________________________
zfs-discuss mailing list
zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org
http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
