On Monday 19 October 2009 14:16:30 Jim March wrote:
> Folks,
> 
> Say I have an HP 17" laptop with DUAL hard drive bays (IDE).  I buy
> 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"?
> 
> I assume I don't need hardware support for that, right?
> 
> Thanks...
> 
> Jim
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This can be done, though "easy" is not a word usually associated with it. 
I'm wondering if you might want to create the raid NOW, telling it is a 2 
drive array mirrored and force it to create the array with only one device. 
Then when you receive the second device tray and can set it up, you could tell 
mdadm that the second device is there and it will just rebuild the mirror.

I have not tried that way before. Sounds like a fun task for virtualmachine.


Okay, you can do this easily!!!

http://nst.sourceforge.net/nst/docs/user/ch14.html

This page discusses creating a mirrored array with one device "missing" and 
added later.

Good luck!
-- 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Nathan England
Information Security Consultant
http://www.paysonlinux.org/
Software Development
Web Development
Hardware Integration
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