On Tuesday 09 February 2010 13:46:40 Stroller wrote: > On 9 Feb 2010, at 00:27, Neil Bothwick wrote: > > On Mon, 8 Feb 2010 14:34:01 -0600, Paul Hartman wrote: > >> Thanks for the info everyone, but do you understand the agony I am > >> now > >> suffering at the fact that all disk in my system (including all parts > >> of my RAID5) are starting on sector 63 and I don't have sufficient > >> free space (or free time) to repartition them? :) > > > > With the RAID, you could fail one disk, repartition, re-add it, > > rinse and > > repeat. But that doesn't take care of the time issue. > > Aren't you thinking of LVM, or something? > > Stroller. >
Not sure where LVM would fit into this, as then you'd need to offload the data from that PV (Physical Volume) to a different PV first. With Raid (NOT striping) you can remove one disk, leaving the Raid-array in a reduced state. Then repartition the disk you removed, repartition and then re- add the disk to the array. Wait for the rebuild to complete and do the same with the next disk in the array. Eg: (for a 3-disk raid5): 1) remove disk-1 from raid 2) repartition disk-1 3) add disk-1 as new disk to raid 4) wait for the synchronisation to finish 5) remove disk-2 from raid 6) repartition disk-2 7) add disk-2 as new disk to raid 8) wait for the synchronisation to finish 9) remove disk-3 from raid 10) repartition disk-3 11) add disk-3 as new disk to raid 12) wait for the synchronisation to finish (These steps can easily be adapted for any size and type of raid, apart from striping/raid-0) I do, however, see a potential problem, if you repartition starting from sector 64 instead of from sector 63, the disk has 1 sector less, which means 4KB less in size. The Raid-array may not accept the re-partitioned disk back into the array because it's not big enough for the array. I had this issue with an older system once where I replaced a dead 80GB (Yes, I did say "old" :) ) with a new 80GB drive. This drive was actually a few KB smaller in size and the RAID would refuse to accept it. -- Joost Roeleveld
