[WBEL-users] Adding to RAID 1, only sees new partition as spare... {Scanned} {Scanned}

[John Morris]

On Wed, 2005-05-18 at 15:21, Kirby C. Bohling wrote:

> I've read that you can create a RAID device, and tell it there are
> two devices, and make one that fails immediatly (any old block
> device will do the job as long as it appears to be large enough).
> It will write the meta-data to the first block device so it looks
> like it has two devices.  (Essentially, you are creating a mirror
> with a device that fails immediatly, and then adding a new device
> later).

>From the mdadm manpage:
To create a "degraded" array in which some devices are missing, simply
give the word "missing" in place of a device name.

> I've never seen anyone actually do it.

I have done it several times.   Really handy to image drives like that. 
I stick one drive in an external cage and build it as a RAID1 array with
one drive missing.  When it gets into the final destination machine with
a blank second drive I run a little script for replacing a drive that
partitions the blank drive and hotadds it to the array.

-- 
John M.      http://www.beau.org/~jmorris     This post is 100% M$Free!
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