From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: kclair Subject: Re: adding a disk smaller than the array size Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2004 16:29:09 -0400 Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org Message-ID: References: <200410132254.22483.maarten@ultratux.net> <200410140008.23084.maarten@ultratux.net> <20041013224643.GA9601@jim.sh> Reply-To: kclair Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <20041013224643.GA9601@jim.sh> To: Jim Paris , linux-raid@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids On Wed, 13 Oct 2004 18:46:43 -0400, Jim Paris wrote: > > And failing everything, you could (maybe) clone the array-disk to the empty > > smaller one, run fsck to fix the partition size (but I'm not totally sure it > > does, so that remains doubtful), reverse the roles of the two disks and then > > add the -now free- larger disk to the array. But that would be a last resort. > > I cannot vouch for how md copes with the few missing sectors, and neither how > > the filesystem reacts, so you'd better not try that without good testing. > > Or just do this same thing at the filesystem level. > > Right now you have md0 with one missing disk. Use your new disk to > create md1 with one missing disk. Create filesystem on md1, and copy > files with e.g. tar, rsync, etc. Then get rid of md0 and add that > drive to md1. > > -jim > Thanks for all the info and the suggestions. The key factor here was that I could not just build an array with one disk containing the data and one unformatted disk and hope they would sync up. I followed Jim's advice successfully ... except that mdadm reports that the new array is State: dirty. But at least the data is accessible once again! Kristina