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Home > Archive > Data Storage > February 2006 > HELP! Spanned volume -> Raid5 conversion
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HELP! Spanned volume -> Raid5 conversion
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| Three years ago when some idiots set up the fileserver, for some reason
- space i guess (though it wasn't required back then), the main SCSI
drive array was configured as a single spanned volume consisting of 5x
34GB drives. This mistake wasn't noticed until recently when i added a
new RAID 1 array in a seperate bay! (I'm new to the job so didn't have
knowledge of the previous setup)
This volume contains both the boot partition and the absolutely
critical data partition. and has no redundancy whatsoever. It's just a
matter of time before a drive goes down rendering it all lost and me
going postal
Possible solutions i came up with included ghosting the volume to the
new empty array, then recreating the volume as a RAID 5 setup then
ghosting back. The trouble there is that the recreated drive will be
smaller by 34GB due to the loss of one drive space for parity. Reducing
the data size before ghosting would obviously be the way to go but i'm
not sure how the ghost of a 170gb volume would transfer back onto a
143GB array even if the 170gb volume had more then enough free space to
fit. I know ghost weill shrink to fit. but that will shrink both
partitions in the volume i assume?
Anyways, the most viable solution i could come up with was adding a 6th
drive (on a seperate controller as the case would be) and then
converting the 5x 34GB spanned volume into a 6 drive, 5x 34GB capacity
RAID 5 array
Is this doable? Or is my only chance at sucessful conversion goign to
be zapping the spanned volume and recreating fresh as raid 5 (not so
keen to do that...)
Thanks
Sean
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| What hardware are you running on? If it is a Proliant Smart Array, the
conversion should be easy. Otherwise, I would recommend backing up the
data, rebuilding from scratch, and restoring the data.
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