How to re-purpose drives

[ralfb]

Hello again,

I've got 3 x 2TB HDDs in my greyhole storage pool.

After moving all shares to a non-greyhole drive,

I'm hopping to transform these 3 drives into a RAID1 plus 1 SPARE drive array and to use this new RAID1 drive as the location for the shares.

I'd appreciate it it someone would walk me through this.

[ralfb]

I now have 3 unmounted and unpartitioned 2 TB HDDs.

I was hoping to use the Disk Utility application to create a new RAID 1 array however when I try to commit the changes, I receive a 'Permission Denied" / "Not Authorized" message.

I'm much appreciate some help with this.

thanks

[sandstroem]

May I ask why you want to do this?

If you add all three drives onto your Greyhole storage pool you get 6 TB of data store. Then per share you enable extra copies if you need redundancy.

If your goal is to use 3x2TB drives as RAID1 (mirrored) with one hot spare, you will only be able to use total 2TB of storage capacity...

[ralfb]

Sure you may, np.

Although I will continue to use greyhole for my home server, the office server has shown to be too unreliable in a work environment.

It is my intention to move /var/hda/files/ to a 2TB Raid 1 array and keep one 2 TB drive as a back-up drive.

By the time the office uses 2TB of storage some years will have passed so the benefit of an ever growing storage pool is not needed in this case and who knows what solutions will be available by then.

It's frustrating that Fedora's (Fedora 14) disk utility will not allow me to create a RAID array.

I've searched Google to find a number of Permission Denied issues reported but have not found a solution.

Can someone walk me through this using terminal commands?

[ralfb]

Update:

so far so good.

The drives to be used as RAID 1 are: /dev/sdc and /dev/sdd

A bit of reading on the interweb got me as far as:

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mdadm --create /dev/md1 --level=mirror --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdc /dev/sdd

I recreated a new RAID 1 array at /dev/md1 as /dev/md0 is the system RAID

then waited for about 6 hours for the array to re-ync.

(not sure if necessary to wait, especially since dives are empty but you never know with the wonderful and wired way of computers)

next FORMAT:

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mkfs.ext4 /dev/md1

next Check to see what the RAID status is:

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cat /proc/mdstat

shows:

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md1: active raid1 sdd[1] sdc[0] md0: active raid1 sda2[0] sdb1[1]

not bad for a first stab at this.

Next need to work out how to copy /var/hda/files to this new array and mount it as /var/hda/files

In the meantime I've mounted the 3rd 2TB drive /dev/sde at /backup

Any help would be much appreciated

[ralfb]

continued after some more reading on the internet:

mounting the new raid array:

1) create a new dir at / (root)

as superuser:

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mkdir /raid1

then mount:

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mount /dev/md1 /raid1

raid1 now gives me 1.7TB of storage (nice)

then make /raid1 part of user group

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chown user /raid1

then copy everything from var/hda/files/x to /raid1 (except /var/hda/files/drives) - I used the VNC desktop for this rather than terminal.

(l like to copy rather than move (mv) - just in case)