Cloning 1 hard disk in a software RAID

[Liam Proven]

2009/7/28 Alvin Chang <alvin.chang at gmail.com>:
> On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 16:20, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I have a degraded & rather unstable software RAID on my server. 1 disk
>> does not register at all any more & the md subsystem won't mount it as
>> being "stale". Another sometimes mounts but won't stay up for long.
>
> What does cat /proc/mdstat say? Which RAID level is it?
>
>>
>> <snip>
>> dd if=/dev/sdd of=/dev/sde
>>
>> to copy the whole of the unstable drive onto a new one.
>>
>> Should this work, or is it a disastrously bad idea or something?
>
> Well, that really depends... if the source drive is broken, you might need
> to use something other than dd to clone the disk so that it ignores bad
> sectors, e.g. Gohst 4 Linux...

I don't think I have any bad blocks, it just won't always spin up.

> In fact, if you are using RAID5 or above... simply re-initialize the array
> with a working blank drive should do the trick.

Tried that; nothing seems to happen & this is the only copy of the
data that I have so I am wary of experimenting too much...


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