Hi,

Firstly, thank you for checking this post.

This might be a very simply question for you guys, but any help will be really appreciated.

We have a Sun X2200M2 server running Redhat 5 with 2 x 250G disk software RAID 1 in production environment.

we want to test some commands in that system which we do not know the impact. so we prefer to mirror the exactly same HDD from that server in to our testing x2200M2 with same hardware environment.

is there a good solution we have do that disk mirror?

again, thank you for the help.

Andy

I think rsync would be best for this. It comes with most distributions. Read the man page for more details, and/or find an online tutorial like this one: http://everythinglinux.org/rsync/.

you can do it using different tools and command, generally DD command is common for disk imaging or mirrors and works great too. also some tools like partimage can solve your problem.


Using of DD command

you can also take the backup into a image file and than restore on another harddrive.

TO backup into file
To restore file on another HDD
more resources for "DD" command

http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/10/...mand-examples/

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ommand-362506/


also you can create a disk partition layout and just copy paste all the files from one disk to another disk will work same
you understand it here.
http://linux-sxs.org/administration/mirror_hdd.html



also you can install partimage utility, another powerfull utility for disk mirror, but i believe that it is not shipped with Redhat 5 by default you need to download it and install it.

http://www.debiantutorials.org/back-...ndows-204.html

1 members found this post helpful.

@ BeerISGood,

rsync will not make HDD bootable, it will not take the backup of MBR so HDD will not boot even after rysnc.

Hi em31amit,

Thank you for your post. the only question i have now is the x2200 M2 server only has two disk slots which are in used for RAID 1.

so, you mean i need pull out one of disk and insert a new disk in and then run that DD command to mirror the whole disk?

if i pull out one of HDD, would new disk get sync automatically after i insert in? because of raid 1?

sorry, my question may be really sounds stupid. but appreciate your comments.

Andy

Fair enough. I was thinking more of mirroring a file structure than a physical drive. DD is the way.

You should check your actual HW, but according to this http://www.solarsystems.com/products...200_m2_server/ that system has hot-swappable disks, so you could pull one out, load a blank, the use the swapped out one to start a new system...

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you all.

I will give it try.

Andy

are you using software raid or hardware raid on your server, you need to take care of that too and also for hot swapping drive is good way to do, but still you should make sure while hot-swapping drive that you have detach from OS and again rescan when attached, you need to rescan the scsi-bus else os will not show to you into the /dev path and also in fdisk -l output

this is the command to scan scsi bus hdd on rhel5