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Current situation:

  • Dell PowerEdge T300 server (SAS6/iR controller) (RAID 0/1)
  • Ubuntu 10.04 LTS server installed on software raid (2x500GB) + LVM. Currently used space 25GB.

Questions:

  1. How to make a secure backup of current installation in case of rollback. E.g. Clonezilla does not support software RAID.
  2. How to migrate Ubuntu installation to hardware raid (same PC same HDDs)?

Optional objective:

  1. Is it possible to get rid of LVM too?
BlackTea
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2 Answers2

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Since you are only using 25 GB, I would consider backing up the system at the file system level with a program such as tar to an external USB drive. Again, since the data is small, verify that you can perform a restore. After you are confident about backup / restore procedues. I would start from scratch by creating a hardware raid partition, booting up with a Live CD and then restoring your data. You will then need to create a new boot record with GRUB so that the system can be booted up to the newly restored system.

jftuga
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  • Thanks. But I'm not pro sysadmin and I do not know how to reconfig my system. Remove LVM, update partitioning data, create needed boot records and other stuff. – BlackTea Oct 18 '12 at 14:46
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Software raid - mirror? Then you can get off one disk from raid (more safely - then server is down) - that will be your original backup.

Next step is setup hardware raid on controller. You can build raid, if you have one more disk (create mirror). If not - this may be a problem (controllers usually don`t allow to create degraded raid. Take a look at quick init options or another way - is create raid0 volume on controller and trying to convert it to raid1 later (if it possible).

If controller does not support such features, and you dont have additional disk, well, its very difficult to replace metadata of software raid to metadata hardware raid and dont crush something. :)

If controller have some feature, or you have additional hdd, - just create volume, boot from some livecd/usb/pxe and just copy disk from one mount-point to another. And don`t forget about fstab and mbr.

unlo
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  • Thank You.Yep software mirror to hardware mirror (raid1). I'll check for degraded RAID support or spare HDD. Can You elaborate on fstab, mbr and making sure linux boots&mounts properly (cause I assume it does not have all these fancy hardware plug'n'play checks)? I'm not pro sysadmin so that would be very helpful. – BlackTea Oct 18 '12 at 14:40
  • Can You elaborate on "And don`t forget about fstab and mbr." part? Please? – BlackTea Oct 23 '12 at 19:52