[BlueOnyx:17590] Re: RAID1 failure BlueOnyx 5208R

[Tigerwolf]

On Wed, 13 May 2015, Tom wrote:

> Unless I'm reading wrong, I cannot find a way to RAID the drives without
> losing the data on the good drive. I have backed everything up and can
> rebuild, but prefer to just RAID the drives.

In theory, you should be able to do that, and you shouldn't have to lose 
any data from the good drive.  Replacing a failed drive without data loss 
is the reason for doing raid 1 in the first place!

I can't answer about a hardware PC Raid card.  You'd have to consult the 
documentation for that.

For the general case, do a Google search on 'replacing a failed raid 1 
drive'.  You'll find several tutorials on the steps to follow.  Also add 
your hardware raid card type to the search, and see what you can find for 
it.

> I can't figure out the proper command to raid the 2 drives.

In general, you have to make sure the drives are partitioned exactly the 
same.  At least for software raid, this is done with sfdisk to copy the 
existing partition table to the new drive.  Ideally, the drives will be 
the same models, or at least the same storage capacity.  The new drive 
*cannot* be smaller than the old one, and if the new drive is larger, the 
extra space won't be used. Once partitioned, you can rebuild the array 
with mdadm.

> So my question is, since my PC supports hardware RAID1, is it possible to
> RAID the drives using the bios routine, or will it cause a failure to boot?

I can't answer for hardware raid, as how to handle that will depend on the 
make and model of the card and what built-in utilities that may possess. 
Again, You'll have to consult the documentation for what you have.