Hi All,

I had 4 partitions / , /home, /group and swap all mirrored on two IDE disks HDA and HDB. I set this up with the RAID options during the red hat installer.

However I've managed to completey screw everything up by resizing partitions and I am dropped to RAID repair everytime I bootup.

Is there a way to just stop the mirroring and get rid of all the /dev/md? devices from the kernel then boot the system up in a non raid state, ie from /dev/hda1 not /dev/md0. Then just rebuild the raid array from scratch rather than trying to figure out what I did with the original config.

I've tried updating the /etc/raidtab and running mkraid --upgrade /dev/md0 etc but its always complaining partitions are mounted and wont change anything. How do I un-raid a software raid configuration if possible (I'm assumig this is impossible with RAID4,5 but it seems possible with RAID1 (at least I've done it in Novell and NT many years ago).

I'm pretty new with software raid (have a few production redhat systems with hardware raid) and am getting my head around exactly what is happening here.

Actually that makes me think of one other question, if you have a RAID1,4 or 5 array (no spare disk) and a disk fails will the machine keep running or will it just shut down awaiting a replacement device (but not having lost any data).