Iain, On Wed, 20 Jun 2001, Iain Campbell wrote: > man raidtab says > > failed-disk index > The most recently defined device is inserted at position index in > the raid array as a failed device. This allows you to create raid > 1/4/5 devices in degraded mode - useful for installation. Don't > use the smallest device in an array for this, put this after the > raid-disk definitions! > > I can see that it would be possible to build a RAID in degraded mode, > but how will this help installation, and installation of what, anyway? I think that the reason installation is mentioned is if you want to install onto a RAID array, but not all the disks are available (perhaps they have previously failed, or they are holding the original data). For instance, say you have a server with a 40G disk, and you want to upgrade it to a RAID-1 mirror of two 40G disks... you could install on the new (unused) 40G disks as a degraded RAID-1 mirror of the new disk and /dev/null (as a failed-disk). Then, once up and running you could copy everything from the old-disk to the degraded raid array, and once the old disk is no longer needed to store the data, add it to the RAID array and resync it. Regards, Corin /------------------------+-------------------------------------\ | Corin Hartland-Swann | Tel: +44 (0) 20 7491 2000 | | Commerce Internet Ltd | Fax: +44 (0) 20 7491 2010 | | 22 Cavendish Buildings | Mobile: +44 (0) 79 5854 0027 | | Gilbert Street | | | Mayfair | Web: http://www.commerce.uk.net/ | | London W1K 5HJ | E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | \------------------------+-------------------------------------/ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
