> On 30 Jul 2026, at 15:02, Alexander Hall <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Not supported with softraid. You can't create a "1-disk RAID1" and add
>> the second drive later either. Unless you want to get dirty with poking
>> at low level data structures, you'll either need to have both new drives
>> and the remaining working old drive connected at the same time and
>> dump/restore, or dump to external media + swap drives + restore, etc.
>
>
> I don't think the intention is to create a new single-disk RAID1.
I was happy he provided that note, though, because that was the “other”
option I’d thought of.
> It sounds more like replacing/rebuilding/"resilver" one underlying disk at a
> time onto a larger RAID partition and then let the sr disk grow into them,
> giving free space at the end of it.
That was my original ask, yes. Something like that. The other thought I’d
had was maybe trying to make a second one-disk RAID1, then copy the data,
then fix the “new” RAID1 with a matching larger disk. But that was the
less-preferred option.
>
> This might be trickier, but one might be able to force bioctl to
> reinitialize a larger RAID1 on top of the former.
>
> Anyway, this probably shouldn't be attempted if you are not ready to accept
> losing your data. Even if so, I would recommend trying it out on a smaller
> scale with some spare drives first.
Yeah, I sent a more recent note asking how plausable these changes would be.
But are you saying that I might be able to use bioctl without any changes
to kernel or application to “force” the size to be right? Hmm. Yeah, that
definitely sounds dangerous to the enclosed file system. But I think if that
is even possible, it makes it clear that it shouldn’t be hard to modify the
underlying system to be able to figure that out itself then bioctl could
just have a “expand” to tell the soft device to grow. I suppose that is
most easily done after both drives are replaced with larger ones, but if I
performed the “trick” of one then the other, which on a ZFS mirror allows
it to do this same thing if you’ve turned on “autoexpand”; then it seems
like the sr would be the original size on two larger disks and we could have
a manual operation triggered with bioctl that will cause the “expand”
operation. I’m okay with there not being an “autoexpand”, as long as
there is a way to cause the expansion by just pushing a [effective] button.
But either way, it’s not something that can be done right now in 7.9.
I’ll proceed with copying the data off, building a new array, then copying
the data back. Luckily, it’s a home server and it being in single user
for a couple hours isn’t a big deal.
Thanks all.
-Chris
