Imaging Mirrored OS Drives
For those who have been following my attempt to create IMAGES of a pair of drives with mirrored OS partitions, and then restore the IMAGES to a new set of drives...
This doesn't work directly. The imaging programs are FAST because they do not perform block level copying. They replicated partition structure and copy FILES from disk to image and then image to disk.
As I have just discovered, when I restore the images to NEW clean drives, the partitions on the NEW drives do not have any RAID information. No UUID for mdadm to use. No RAIDS to assemble. But the file information is there.
So, my questions are...
1) Is it now possible to CREATE mirrored partitions with mdadm AND still KEEP the existing data on the NEW set of drives. In other words, create the mirrors AFTER the fact (given that the data on the drives is identical).
2) Furthermore, if the above is possible, in creating the arrays on the new drives is there a way to force mdadm to give the arrays specific UUID numbers? It looks like I can do that with mdadm --update? Should I create the arrays first using the normal "mdadm -C" procedure, and then update the UUIDs?
I want to update the UUIDs so that they are the same as the UUIDs on the partitions on the original set of drives.
Andy Liebman
On Wed, Aug 16, 2006 at 01:05:39PM -0400, andy liebman wrote:
if the imaging software is not too smart and creates the partitions and filesystems with the exact same size as the original, yes. (i mean that there should be some space between the end of the filesystem and the end of the partition to store the md superblock)
Quoted 1 line
2) Furthermore, if the above is possible, in creating the arrays on the new drives is there a way to force mdadm to give the arrays specific UUID numbers? It looks like I can do that with mdadm --update? Should I create the arrays first using the normal "mdadm -C" procedure, and then update the UUIDs?
never tried that, let us know how you fare.
L.
Signature · 6 lines
Luca Berra -- [email protected] Communication Media & Services S.r.l. /"\ \ / ASCII RIBBON CAMPAIGN X AGAINST HTML MAIL / \