Cloning 1 hard disk in a software RAID

Liam Proven lproven at gmail.com
Tue Jul 28 18:37:50 UTC 2009


2009/7/28 Colin Law <clanlaw at googlemail.com>:
> 2009/7/28 Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com>:
>> 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...
>
> I am sure will already have done this but backup the _really_
> important stuff onto CD or another machine or something before doing
> anything else

I can't, the array won't stay up long enough... Thus the last-ditch
efforts to try to get some stuff off the blasted thing.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
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