Disk Recovery Part III

[Don Levey]

Kent wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 20, 2005 at 09:07:45PM -0500, Don Levey wrote:
>> Just an update for those who were so kind as to help me:
>>
>> I've gotten my two new disks; they just arrived today.  I've
>> partitioned one of them as follows:
>>
>> 0.5 GB	/boot
>> 35.0 GB	/
>> 25.0 GB	/home
>> 95.0 GB	/misc
>> 2.5 GB	swap
>>
>> [...]
>> Once I'm sure this will boot, I can add the second drive on another
>> IDE interface and do whatever RAID magic I neet to get the /, /home
>> and /misc mirrored.
>
> I suggest you mirror all of those partitions.  Yes, you can put swap
> on raid, it will be faster, and it will keep you running if a disk
> goes down.  Why be selective?  Mirror everything.
>
> -kb

Hmm... Mirror the /boot partition too?  I can see mirroring the swap; it
seems to be even arguments for and against.  So here's the next question:

Can I RAID these devices while the system is running?  That is, boot off the
first of the two drives, edit the /etc/fstab to take the new partition names
(md2, md3, etc) into account, edit the /etc/raidtab file to add the new RAID
partitions, and then run mkraid on the running drives/system to synch up?
Is that all there is to it?  Somehow it seems too easy.

At the very least, I can probably get an FAQ out of this, though looking at
the BLU website I don't see an FAQ section.

Thanks again,
 -Don