Newbie question on adding RAID capacity

[Philip Prindeville]

Alexander Dalloz wrote:

>Am Do, den 28.07.2005 schrieb Philip Prindeville um 23:06:
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>>I initially did a fairly stock install onto a K8M800 type motherboard
>>(AMD 64 XP 2800+ processor, 8237R/K8M800 type chipset) with
>>the SATA raid capability.  I'll soon be adding another drive as soon
>>as I can receive it (it's one of those Maxtor Diamondmax drives that
>>have been going like hotcakes).
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>If you have just 1 hard disk actually (not sure if I understand your
>description properly), you then can't have setup a RAID so far.
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It was initially set up as a single disk...  But since the hardware has raid
capability, I figure... why not?  Can never have too much disk space...

So I was wondering if I needed to do anything special to make the second
drive become part of the RAID array...

>>My question is...  Do I need to do anything in particular to "widen"
>>the raid stripe and add the drive to the volume?  Will the filesystem
>>be "re-interleaved" across two drives?  Or do I have to do something
>>painful like save to DVD, add the new drive, create new filesystems,
>>and then restore from DVD?
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>If you already have a 2 drive RAID0 (you said "stripe") you can't simply
>add another hard disk to it to extend the size.
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No, it's not yet a RAID0.  It's a single disk.  I'll be adding a second 
disk,
and hoping to make it into a RAID0.


>If at install time you did setup an LVM (done as default by automatic
>partitioning), you can extend the logical volume group easily. LVM is
>made exactly for the case to extend storage space. Please see the
>documentation in that case.
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>http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/
>http://www.tldp.org/ -> LVM/LVM2 howto
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>>-Philip
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>In all other cases you have to backup your data and do a fresh install.
>Rethink whether you really want a RAID0 as if 1 single drive fails all
>your data will be lost.
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Well, I'm running on a single disk right now, and if it fails, I'm 
screwed anyway. ;-)

-Philip

>Alexander
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