From: Jim March <1.jim.march@gmail.com>
> two WD 320gig IDE drives but oops, I only have a "caddy" (little
> metal tray) for one drive.  I can get another but it'll be here in
> two weeks.  I put one brand new drive in the one caddy I have
> available, load Linux (say, Ubuntu Karmic beta), get it all running
> and tuned.
> 
> Two weeks later the other caddy comes in, I drop the 2nd hard disk
> in--how easy is it to now create a raid-1 mirror in software, doing
> "on the fly backup"?

Create the softRAID in degraded mode.  I don't know how the Ubuntu
installer handles that, but the command is like so:

mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-disks=2 missing /dev/hdc1

...taken from
http://www200.pair.com/mecham/raid/raid1-degraded-etch.html , lots of
info there, but it's a tad paranoid.  If you create the softRAID in
degraded mode, then you pop the new disk in later, it'll work without
a lot of hassle.  You will probably have to partition the new disk
and set the partition types to 0xFD before the system will work with
it, but that's not that tough.  It'll require at least one reboot
though.

-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see


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