software raid to Hardware raid

Hello,
We have a Red Hat 7.1 box running kernel 2.4.17-SMP. We have
raidtools installed. We had a hardware RAID that got converted to a software raid by mistake. Is there any way to go back without loosing the data? the device is showing up as /dev/md0. Thank you.

--Ken

1 - back up your data
2 - convert to hw raid
3 - test carefully to be sure it works
4 - reload your data

And left out, step zero, consider why you want to do this if what you have is working reliably also, between 2 and 3 consider upgrading to a distribution and kernel written this millenium.

Given the state of hardware raid when that kernel was new, and the state of the drivers, I would be very sure I had a GOOD reason to change anything.

bill davidsen <[email protected]>
 CTO TMR Associates, Inc
 Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979

Thank you for your reply. It is a little more than a terabyte worth of information. And although we have everything backed up on tape, it will take a very long time to restore it. The reason we need to do this is because when it was converted to software RAID, we lost a lot of performance. There are about twenty 80 gig hard drives hooked to two promise RAID controllers. Can I just run raidstop /dev/md0 and not loose the data and still have the original hardware RAID still there? Thanks.

--Ken