RAID Setup

To set up RAID1 mirroring on an existing Linux system, I've done something like this in the past. It may need some modernisation - though maybe only because everyone uses grub and SATA drives now, and ext3 instead of ext2.

  • Boot from a rescue CD or floppy that has mdadm and resize2fs.
umount /mnt/sysimage/
# Set up RAID devices and superblocks on hda
mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/hda9 missing
mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md1 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/hda5 missing 
mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md2 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/hda6 missing
mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md3 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/hda1 missing 
mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md4 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/hda7 missing

# Fix summary information on disk. Don't abort on initial error.
fsck -f /dev/md0
fsck -f /dev/md1
fsck -f /dev/md2
fsck -f /dev/md3
fsck -f /dev/md4

# Resize the partitions to account for RAID superblock size.
resize2fs /dev/md0
resize2fs /dev/md1
resize2fs /dev/md2
resize2fs /dev/md3
resize2fs /dev/md4

mount /dev/md0 /mnt/sysimage/
vi /mnt/sysimage/etc/fstab
  • Using fdisk, change the partition types on both drives to RAID autodetect.
  • Edit the fstab to use the mdx nodes instead of hdax ones
reboot
  • Once the system comes back up:
# Hot-add the hdc partitions to the mirror sets

mdadm --manage -a /dev/md0 /dev/hdc9
mdadm --manage -a /dev/md1 /dev/hdc5
mdadm --manage -a /dev/md2 /dev/hdc6
mdadm --manage -a /dev/md3 /dev/hdc1
mdadm --manage -a /dev/md4 /dev/hdc7

# Create an mdadm.conf file (not really necessary, but prevents some
# start-up drive scanning rubbish from appearing on the console)

mdadm --detail --scan > /etc/mdadm.conf

  • Edit the mdadm.conf to include a DEVICE line
  • Change lilo to use a root of md0 instead of hda9
  • Done!