General :: RAID A Drive Already Containing Data?
Aug 13, 2010
I currently have a 1.5TB sata drive connected to my system, with data already on it. In the next few days I am planning to use mdadm to create a raid5 array with another 2 1.5TB drives along with the one I already have. Is it possible to create the raid without losing the data on my current hard drive? Obviously it will be backed up before hand just in case, but it would be nice not to have to restore nearly a TB of data after raid'ing the drives.
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Apr 7, 2010
I am trying to create a RAID data drive for my system but I am having setting it up since I am a total linux noob.
The system has 3 physical HDD-s:
1. 320 GB (has functional Ubuntu 9.10 installation) attached to a PCI SATA card
2. 2TB on motherboard
3. 2TB on PCI SATA card
I want to create a software RAID1 of disks 2 and 3. So far I have used the Palimpsest Disk Utility:
- Created a GUID Partition table on both disks (2, 3)
- Used File -> New -> Software Array, made sure both my drives were included
- Once Palimpsest listed the RAID Drive as a Software RAID Array, I told it to create Ext3 filesystem on it
Well.. at least thats what I thought I did. At this point I have been able to mount the RAID drive and put files on it. However when I look at its information in Palimpsest, I am told that the drive is not partitioned. Both RAId components /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdc1 are reported to be in Sync, but the RAID Drive's own state is 'Running, Resyncing @ 45%' (and lowly growing).
My questions are: Is this a normal setup or did I do something incorrectly? Why is the drive reporting to have no partition? And howcome I can use it if it does not have a partition? I have found the command line based configurations to be a tad too confusing to follow, so I have tried to stick to graphical tools - is this a hopeless cause in Ubuntu or is it possible to achieve what I want to do without command line? I will list some info on my disks below - perhaps this offers more insight to those of you more familiar with Linux.
Code:
mindgamer@mind-server:~$ sudo lshw -C disk
[sudo] password for mindgamer:
*-disk:0
description: ATA Disk
product: WDC WD3200BEVT-0
vendor: Western Digital
[Code]...
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Oct 17, 2010
I was using a Buffalo LinkStation Duo to store pictures and the OS in the unit failed. As far as I know, the data on the two 1 TB drives is fine, and since Buffalo uses a Linux kernel in their LinkStation and the format is xfs, it should be possible to get the data off if I can mount one of the drives on a Linux box. I've put one of the drives into an external USB enclosure and attached it to my Linux system, but I cannot get the drive to mount, probably because it is one element of a Raid 1 array.
Most of what I can find on the Web concerns setting up a new Raid array, not creating an array around a drive that already contains data. I have installed mdadm, and I'm running Mint Linux release 9 (Isadora) on an Intel box. When I run mdadm -D /dev/sdb or sdb6, the device and the partition where the data is located, it reports that the device does not appear to be an md device. I'm not sure what that means. Any help would be greatly appreciated, as I've got around 13,000 photos on these disks that have no backup (I figured what could go wrong with mirrored copies?).
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Jun 1, 2010
I had to recently reinstall ubuntu because 10.04 started acting up on me. I reinstalled 9.04 but I don't know how to mount my RAID drive without messing with the data that's already on there. I have the UUID for the RAID but fstab isn't able to find it. I also previously used RAID software but I don't remember which one I used. how to mount my drive so that ubuntu can see it?
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Jun 5, 2010
I have never preformed a rebuild of an RAID array. I am collecting resources, which details how to build an RAID 5 array when one drive has failed. Does the BIOS on the RAID controller card start to rebuild the data on the new drive once it is installed?
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Apr 13, 2009
how to set up a boot partition on the first hard drive separate from two RAID 5 configurations on a Supermicro server with 1-750GB hard drive for the boot partition, and 15-1TB hard drives for data. The 15 hard drives are split into two RAID 5 configurations (7 -TB drives and 8 1-TB drives). I will be installing CentOS 5.2, and the 15 Terabytes of data will store data, and the 750GB hard drive(on port 0) will only have the 100MB boot file. I am using 3ware BIOS Manager to configure the first array of 7 hard drives, and the second array of 8 hard drives (1 drive with boot information will not be included in the array).
to recap, picture this: I want to load CentOS on this server. /dev/sda1 (on the bottom left drive) needs to house the boot partition set for 100MB. The remaining 7 drives (the left half, not counting the boot drive) need to be set up as a RAID 5 array. The eight drives on the right (right half) also need to be setup as a RAID 5 array. After I configure this in BIOS, I run the CentOS setup disk in graphical mode. I get to the portion after the Language and keyboard setup where it says "Installation requires partitioning of your hard drive. By default, a partitoning layout is chosen which is reasonable for most users. You can either choose to use this or create your own. Select the drive(s) to use for this installation". The drives listed are:
"sda 5721980 MB AMCC 9650-SE-8LP DISK"
"sdb 1020 MB AMCC 9650-SE-8LP DISK"
"sdc 714218 MB AMCC 9650-SE-8LP DISK"
"sdd" 6675643 MB AMCC 9650-SE-8LP DISK"
When I choose "Remove Linux partitions on the selected drives and create default layout." or any other option, I get different errors. I notice when configuring via text mode I get better options to install. I can't install the boot drive separate from the two RAID configurations?
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Jul 18, 2009
how can I create RAID 1+0 using two drives (one is with data and second one is new). Is it possible to synchronize data drive with empty drive and create RAID 1+0 ?
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Jul 27, 2011
Right now I have a 320GB system drive and 3TB data drive. I want to add two more 3TB drives and do a software RAID5 3x3TB. Is that possible without losing the data that is already on the data drive?Just want to make sure before I bought the 2 two drives. Not looking for instructions on how to do it,but if you want to include some that would be great too Just making sure it will work.
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Jul 6, 2010
So I have a system that is about 6 years old running Redhat 7.2 that is supporting a very old app that cannot be replaced at the moment. The jbod has 7 Raid1 arrays in it, 6 of which are for database storage and another for the OS storage. We've recently run into some bad slowdowns and drive failures causing nearly a week in downtime. Apparently none of the people involved, including the so-called hardware experts could really shed any light on the matter. Out of curiosity I ran iostat one day for a while and saw numbers similar to below:
[Code]...
Some of these kinda weird me out, especially the disk utilization and the corresponding low data transfer. I'm not a disk IO expert so if there are any gurus out there willing to help explain what it is I'm seeing here. As a side note, the system is back up and running it just runs sluggish and neither the database folks nor the hardware guys can make heads or tails of it. Ive sent them the same graphs from iostat but so far no response.
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Mar 22, 2011
How long does hardware Raid card (raid 1, 2 drives)take to mirror a 1 TB drive (500gb used)?Is there a general rule of thumb for this?4 hours? 12 hours? 24 hours?
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May 30, 2011
Every time I reboot my server, one of my hard drives drops out of the RAID5 array. I'm pretty sure that there's nothing wrong with the drive itself. I bought all three drives at the same time, and they are identical in make/model/capacity. While the server is running, it's smooth sailing. However, whenever I shut down or reboot, I get an email message that the array is degraded. It's always /dev/sda1 that drops out of the array. I can always rebuild the array by adding the partition back in, but it's a bit of a pain. Any suggestions on how to troubleshoot this?
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Mar 12, 2010
I would like to setup a CentOS file server with LVM and Raid1. Having 6 x 500GB drives, 4 x 1GB Ram and a Quad Core Cpu, I am considering to configure 3 hdd as LVM then raid 1 to the remaining 3 hdd's.
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Jul 28, 2010
I have installed RAID 1 with mdadm and it seems to work looking att /proc/mdstat..I wanted to test the system, so I removed the power cable for one of the disks. When I startup I get this message:
Primary hard drive 0 not found...And cannot start. I'm not sure if there is something in BIOS or in the RAID config? Any ideas?
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Feb 2, 2011
I need to access each drive of a RAID array in order to update the firmware - I am completely new to linux. I think there are probably some potential challanges along the way to get this "working" For example, it seems to me that the array may present itself to application code as a single device. I need to drill down into the RAID and talk to each physical device in turn via some sort of pass-through mechanism. I'm currently pretty lost - can anyone point me in the "right" direction
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Dec 29, 2010
An external 3½" HDD seems to be in danger of failing” it's making ticking sounds when idle. I've acquired a replacement drive, and want to know the best strategy to get the data off of the dubious drive with the best chance of saving as much as possible. There are some directories that are more important than others. However, I'm guessing that picking and choosing directories is going to reduce my chances of saving the whole thing. I would also have to mount it, dump a file listing, and then unmount it in order to be able to effectively prioritize directories. Adding in the fact that it's time-consuming to do this, I'm leaning away from this approach.
I've considered just using dd, but I'm not sure how it would handle read errors or other problems that might prevent only certain parts of the data from being rescued, or which could be overcome with some retries, but not so many that they endanger other parts of the drive from being saved. I guess ideally it would do a single pass to get as much as possible and then go back to retry anything that was missed due to errors.
Is it possible that copying more slowly — e.g. pausing every x MB/GB — would be better than just running the operation full tilt, for example to avoid any overheating issues? For the "where is your backup" crowd: this actually is my backup drive, but it also contains some non-critical and bulky stuff, like music, that aren't backups, i.e. aren't backed up. The drive has not exhibited any clear signs of failure other than this somewhat ominous sound. I did have to fsck a few errors recently — orphaned inodes, incorrect free blocks/inodes counts, inode bitmap differences, zero dtime on deleted inodes; about 20 errors in all.The filesystem of the partition is ext3.
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Jul 19, 2010
I have a Seagate 1TB external USB 2.0 hard disk which contains 740 GB of data. Everytime I connect, it shows the memory occupied and the remaining memory(190GB)..but when i try to access the folders inside they read empty... nothing is seen in the folders.. I am unable to read any data from it or write to it... Same is the case with Windows When I run self-test in Linux ubuntu I get
Reallocated sector count
threshold: 36
Normalized: 61
Worst: 61
value: 6488
Current pending sector count:
Normalized:1
threshold: 0
worst: 1
value:2036
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Oct 4, 2010
My friend just got a gaming laptop that he won't let anyone else use (his last one got infected when his girlfriend surfed on it for just one hour -- he refuses to use antivirus since he claims he knows how to keep clean, but he doesn't trust others).
Because I used Linux a bit once, I said to him what if I could promise not to make any changes to your hard drive, and I told him that I was pretty sure I could boot to a live cd and then only write files to a usb key. He's actually willing to let me try (I showed him some linux sites I was looking at, and he believes me that we can do this).
1) Is there anything I either MUST do or else must NOT do to make sure I make no changes to his laptop's hard drive? And so that any changes are only going to go on the usb drive I hook up?
2) Since he's got an i7 processor, I assume I should get a version of ubuntu that supports 64 bits, right?
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Jan 3, 2011
my linux server is running with an old IDE hard drive getting these hdparm results:
[code]...
i have a WD Raptor drive i'm going to install and put a fresh install of linux on it. i'm just curious, will using a much faster HD as my main drive increase the speeds of my network transfers from the raid drive? do transfers only go as fast as the system drive?
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Feb 20, 2011
I'm looking for a way to quickly remove all data/partitions/boot records from my hard drives while running linux (distribution is irelevant). There are lots of ways to do this that I know of, but they all have some problems. Here's a list of what I've tried/thought of already. The most obvious is fdisk: Simply delete all the partitions. This usually works just fine and is very quick, but there are times it just doesn't....I'm realy not sure what gets left behind...I remove the MBR as well..but whatever it is, it's in the way. A couple other options are:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1M
shred -vfz -n 1 /dev/sdb
Both of these approaches are great if you're selling the components and want to make it very difficult for anyone to recover data. The draw-back is they take so very long to run. I've got four 1.5 TB drives that I've been writing zeros to for 2 days now. If you thought watching grass grow or paint drying was boring. A hundred years ago or so, when I was doing tech support for Windows 95 users we used this nifty dos-based debug script to wipe the hard drive. It was sort-of a last resort thing, but it worked beautifully, most of the time. If the customer had already formated, fdisked, fdisk /mbr, reinstalled Windows, but still couldn't get the thing to work, this would clean the drive so you could do a fresh install.
Just in case someone wants this, I'll post it. To use: first boot to some type of DOS environment in which you have the program "debug".
debug
-F 200 L1000 0
-A CS:100
xxxx:0100 MOV AX,301
xxxx:0103 MOV BX,200
xxxx:0106 MOV CX,1
xxxx:0109 MOV DX,80
NOTE: Type 80 for the primary hard drive - HD 0,
or type 81 for the secondary hard drive - HD 1.
In most cases, the primary hard drive is required 80.
xxxx:010C INT 13
xxxx:010E INT 20
xxxx:0110 (Leave this line blank. Press the <Enter> key to continue.)
-G
The message Program terminated normally appears. How to do something like that while running linux?
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Jan 25, 2010
Does memtet86 write any data to the hard drive? or leave any data in memory once the test is complete. If so does turning of the machine or reboot clears the memory?
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Jun 28, 2011
I wish to read the Manufacturer data and other details such as Device ID, Serial number on a USB drive.
1. Could anyone help me out with information on the memory structure of a USB drive? (which location is the mnfr data stored?)
2. Are there are any commands in Linux that will help in reading/accessing this data?
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Aug 5, 2011
I didn't realize my system drive had filled up... and TaskWarrior overwrote my 'pending.data' with a 0-byte copy. d-: I had worked SO hard to get all my tasks imported from various other notes (many of which I deleted along the way), and hadn't yet prepared for the possibility of data loss. Should've set it up to use my Dropbox...why doesn't TaskWarrior make ANY backup buy default? That data is so important, and yet so small and trivial to backup. Anyway, my 'undo.data' is totally intact and seems to contain all the information theoretically needed to reconstruct 'pending.data'. Unfortunately right now I have no sample 'pending.data' to look at. d-: OR: does anybody know of a simple Linux utility I can use to recover previous file versions? It's possible no data was overwritten, since the replacement is empty.
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Jun 4, 2010
Last night I made the mistake of formatting my media drive. Before the format, it was ext4. then I formatted it to ext4 again because I wasn't paying attention to what I was doing(this mistake only gets made once). Now im looking for away to recover any/all of my data. The drive in question is 1tb. I have not written any new files to this drive.
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Apr 8, 2010
I've got an external hard drive with one large data partition on it. I also have four computers to connect it to (individually, not at the same time). Three machines are running Slackware and one is running Ubuntu 9.10. I need to be able to just plug the drive into whichever machine, mount it (preferably to the same location each time) and not have to worry about user permissions and such. Do I just chmod 777 all the files and folders or is there a better method for different 'users' to access the same partition? And how about mounting to the same location each time?
Now the second part of my question I'm pretty sure I'm not able to do but just in case..... is there any way to encrypt the information safely and make it compatible with a Windows XP machine?
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Jan 12, 2011
whilst installing knoppix 6.3 to my sda, i clicked use all drive and my sdb drive is showing no files in it? has it wiped them out?
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Aug 11, 2010
So I've pulled two hard drives out of my busted windows xp system (dead mb) and I'm trying to get some data off of them. The drives are in raid 0, so my friend told me that I might be able to do something if I use linux. Some late night searching on the internet directed me to a few resources, one of which was this forum. I've tried 2 methods, neither of which have worked.
1. mdadm
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo mdadm --detail /dev/sdb
mdadm: /dev/sdb does not appear to be an md device
2. dmraid
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo dmraid -s
/dev/sdb: "sil" and "hpt45x" formats discovered (using hpt45x)!
ERROR: sil: wrong # of devices in RAID set "sil_agafdhcebccj" [1/2] on /dev/sda
ERROR: removing inconsistent RAID set "sil_agafdhcebccj"
[code]....
I've got some files for work that I'd really like to get off there. I've played with unix a bit in college and I've ran ubuntu before, but usually using the GUI, so a lot of this stuff is over my head. But from what I gather, my system thinks that one of the drives isn't a raid drive?
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Jul 4, 2011
my question is quite simple and at the same time should even sound weird for people that is used to use raids... but here we go! I have got 2 hard disks that do match in space. I'd like to use mdadm to create a raid 1, the mirror one. Since I don't want to format / erase / delete what's in my primary hard disk (/dev/sda, 3 partitions), how can I replicate its content into /dev/sdb and mirror it with the raid tool? Does something like this work?
- install madam
- fdisk /dev/sdb and replicate sda's partitions (using as filesystem "fd");
- sudo mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=mirror --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1
- sudo mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md1 --level=mirror --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda2 /dev/sdb2
sudo mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md2 --level=mirror --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda3 /dev/sdb3
Do you have any page to point, with the right documentation to achieve a replication of the hard disk without a format of the source disk?
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Apr 23, 2009
My friend has a DELL DIMENSION 9150 computer with 2 harddisk (250 GB each) in RAID 0 (fake raid) with Windows XP installed. There are a lot of documents and pictures installed - and no backup ever done! I have found some pages regarding recovery data from RAID 0 () but My friend have bought 2 new harddisks(WESTERN DIGITAL 2500AAJS) which is almost the same as the ones inside.
My plan:
1. copy each harddisk
2. replace original HDDs with my copies
3. try to recover
4. change RAID 0 to normal HDD in BIOS
5. reinstall Windows XP
I have some LINUX distros (DSL, SystemRescCD, UltimateBootCD on Live-CD and UBUNTU installed on one other computer) which I can use. I read about "dmraid" and then try to mounting the RAID in a UBUNTU live-CD version...
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Jun 22, 2011
I'd like to set up RAID for my data partition.
My data are in /dev/sda5 (ext3).
There's an empty partition /dev/sdb5 (ext3).
I want /dev/sdb5 to be a mirror image of /dev/sda5, the command to invoke should be :
mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=mirror --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda5 /dev/sdb5
My question is : how to ensure that the synchronization is done by copying data to the empty space and not the converse ?
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Mar 31, 2010
I want to ensure I have done all I can to configure a system's disks for serious database use. The three areas I know of (any others?) to be concerned about are: I/O size: The database engine and disk's native size should either match, or the database's native I/O size should be a multiple of the disk's native I/O size. DMA: Disks that are capable of Direct Memory Access (eg. IDE) should be configured for it.
Write-caching: When a disk says it has written data persistently, it must be so! No keeping it in cache and lying about it.
I have been looking for information on how to ensure these are so for CentOS and Ubuntu, but can't seem to find anything at all. I want to be able to check these things and change them if needed. The actual hardware involved is very modest. The point is to get the most out of what hardware we do have, even though it's "not very serious hardware" from a broader perspective.
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