Good Afternoon,

I am having trouble with a clients server that I built and I am almost 100% positive I blew it big time when I built the Server... But please offer advice if you can help me out...

Hardware:
Dell PowerEdge1400SC Server
1GB RAM
2x 9GB Boot Drives
2 x 18GB Data Drives

I know under normal circumstances, when I do the build I have to select to build the RAID at that time, but I forgot and did not... I had to put the Server live and online right away because they had just taken possession of thier new office space and did not have time to rebuild like I wanted to.

Is there any way to do an inplace RAID build and leave the Data sets as is... I know I cannot unmount the drives, but is there a program or someone I could hire to do this build? I would like to mirror both the Boot Drive and the Data Drive...

Please let me know...

admin@techwestsolutions.com

Cheers!

/bin/false

A lot depends upon the raid controller you are using.

Some have their own dedicated CPU's and RAM.

In this case, as long as the drive is set to operate in mirror mode, the array should rebuild itself during normal use.

Let's say you have Linux installed on one drive of a mirrored pair.

If the controller's configuration tells it to rebuild the drive in the background, after a few days (maybe up to a week depending upon how often you update files...) the other drive should hold an exact copy of the first drive.

There are usually Windows utilities which will control the rebuild rate and the amount of time/performance hit that can be allocated to the rebuild.

Otherwise with a "dumb" controller, you'll have to take the system offline to rebuild the array.


Prior to the advent of CHEAP SCSI/IDE raid controllers, I would just "dd" one IDE drive to another.

I found that you could even do this from a mounted drive.

The MBR would have to have been built up seperately though, and the drive configured seperately initially...

However when the target drive was booted it would come up "unclean" and an fsck would occur.

After the fsck passed Linux would come up on the backup device just fine...

This does not give you a realtime mirror though.