# Unable to RAID



## Astrit (May 17, 2012)

Greetings,

This is an issue I've tried to tackle many times and I'm about ready to give up. I have an HP Proliant ML110 G5 series server I want to turn into a mail server and I would like to run *Free*BSD. I have four disk drives on it (ada[0123]), ada0 and ada1 are 160GB drives and ada2 and ada3 are 2TB drives. I've tried several times through the guide to do this but run into a problem every time I can't fix.

So where does this leave me? I've had to install everything on one drive. Can anyone walk me through the process of adding a drive to the fstab and migrating /home to the new drive then RAIDing both of them? My fstab isn't exactly standard as it uses /dev/label entries so the FreeBSD guide does not apply here.

Anyone have any helpful advice on how to properly install a mirror from scratch or how to do the above?


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## wblock@ (May 17, 2012)

You're asking two really different questions.  Migrating a filesystem to a different drive is no big deal.  Create a filesystem on the drive, copy data to it, symlink it over the original.  Trying to mirror drives with existing data is a big deal.  Don't do it.  Back up, create a mirror, then restore to it.

In more detail: Move all data off of the 2T drives.  Create a mirror with them.  Set up an MBR and partitions.  Use dump(8)/restore(8) to copy the existing data to that mirror.  Boot from that mirror, make sure it works and the data is all there.  Then you can make another mirror of the two 160G drives.  Or not, the space is not much comparatively and they might be useful elsewhere.


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## Astrit (May 18, 2012)

Ok, maybe I put things out of order. Here's what I'm trying to do. First assume all disks are clean. I want to first off, migrate my entire home directory to one to the 2TB drives, not symlink it. Then I would like to RAID the two 160GB drives with the OS on it (with the troublesome fstab [/dev/label entries]) THEN RAID the two 2TB drives.

What is the step-by-step process for doing this?


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## wblock@ (May 18, 2012)

The first step is a full backup of everything, because creating a mirror is going to wipe out anything on those drives.  "Migrate" is vague, I don't know what you mean by that.  Normally if you put /home on a different directory or drive, you copy it and then symlink to it or mount it over /home.

So back up everything to external media.  Backup Options For FreeBSD shows several methods.  After that, post the drive numbers and we can get more specific.


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