In a message dated: Mon, 08 Oct 2001 01:28:03 EDT
"Kyle Masters" said:
>Would dd do the trick of piling all of a single-drive's data onto a 3-disk
>array and have the ability to boot from it?
It would definitely work, the only problem is tht using dd also
copies your partition map information. If your 2 drives are not
equal, or close to equal in size, then you'll have problems.
I'm assuming that your current boot disk is smaller than the size of
the 3 drive (striped?) RAID array. Therefore, by using dd, you'll
end up losing space on the array, since the partition table copied
over to it will define the size of the drive to be whatever the size
of the origninal boot disk is.
Obviously your best bet is to install the OS directly onto the array.
I'm not sure why you're not doing this, presumably some technical
detail I'm not aware of?
Assuming that you can't install directly onto the RAID array (and
subsequently design a Kickstart server to handle future installs to
automate this entire process) you might want to try something like
this (which could easily be automated in a shell script):
- partition the RAID array accordingly such that it contains
the same file systems as the boot drive. For example,
if you have the following on your boot drive:
Filesystem Size Mounted on
/dev/sda3 471M /
/dev/sda1 19M /boot
/dev/sda5 973M /home
/dev/sda6 471M /var
/dev/sda7 180M /tmp
/dev/sda8 6.2G /usr
Then you'll need to partition your RAID array similarly:
Filesystem Size Mounted on
/dev/sdb3 471M /mnt
/dev/sdb1 19M /mnt/boot
/dev/sdb5 973M /mnt/home
/dev/sdb6 471M /mnt/var
/dev/sdb7 180M /mnt/tmp
/dev/sdb8 6.2G /mnt/usr
Also, note that I've mounted the RAID array onto the /mnt
filesystem (just to make to clarify:
> mount /dev/sdb3 /mnt
> mount /dev/sbb1 /mnt/boot
> mount /dev/sdb5 /mnt/home
etc.)
Once you have the file systems mounted, copy the contents
of the boot drive's file systems to the RAID array:
> find / -mount -print | cpio -pdm /mnt
> find /usr -mount -print | cpio -pdm /mnt/
etc. (you can automate this by:
> for i in / /boot /home /var /tmp /usr
do
find $i -mount -print | cpio -pdm /mnt
done
Now that the data has been moved, you need to:
- edit /mnt/etc/fstab and make sure it's correct
- edit /mnt/lilo to make sure that it points
at the correct boot image
- run 'lilo -r /mnt' so lilo knows to look
at the correct location to find the new location
to find the kernel at.
- reboot to make sure it works.
In theory, this process should work. I make no promises, however, I
have used this process before, and it worked for me. I also want to
point out, that this process was blatantly stolen from SGI's page on
migratinging to an XFS root/boot drive:
http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/xfsroot.html
Since you're not using XFS (at least you haven't mentioned that you
are), then some of the above might need to be tweaked for your
particular situation.
I hope that helps, if not, sorry for being so verbose :)
Good luck, and please report back what you find to be the solution!
**********************************************************
To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] with the following text in the
*body* (*not* the subject line) of the letter:
unsubscribe gnhlug
**********************************************************
