[NBLUG/talk] More hard drive problems

[Kyle Rankin]

On Mon, Oct 03, 2005 at 10:32:52AM -0700, Lincoln Peters wrote:
> On Oct 3, 2005, at 9:26 AM, Bob Blick wrote:
> >
> >By having an array, you have dodged a bullet.
> >
> >At this point you have the ideal opportunity to rethink your ReiserFS
> >choice. Imagine for a second that this was not in a RAID-5 array.  
> >Take a
> >look at the recovery tools available for ReiserFS. Take a look at how
> >poorly they work. I had two hard drives fail in three months, both  
> >running
> >ReiserFS, and it completely blew me away how awful ReiserFS was as  
> >soon as
> >something breaks.
> 
> Good point.  However, the array adds up to about 500GB, almost 400GB  
> of which are in use (don't ask), so unless there's a way to switch  
> filesystems WITHOUT copying the entire contents of the array to  
> another drive first, switching to ext3 (or any other filesystem)  
> would be non-trivial.
> 
> If there is a way that doesn't involve getting another new hard disk,  
> I'm open to suggestions.
> 
> 
> Lincoln Peters
> lmpeters at mac.com
> 

If you did want to change filesystems, basically you'd need at least 2 new
drives. You'd set up a degraded RAID5 on the new drives, format with the
new filesystem (I'd recommend XFS) and then copy all the files over. Once
they are copied over you can hot-add the last drive to the array and have
it sync. 

-- 
Kyle Rankin
NBLUG President
The North Bay Linux Users Group
http://nblug.org
IRC: greenfly at irc.freenode.net #nblug 
kyle at nblug.org