Can I go from /dev/sda to /dev/rd w/o data loss?
 

I have an HP ML370 G4, that was supposed to be preconfigured with RAID1.

To my stupidity with hardware RAID, I moved forward with a full SLES 9 install, and proceeded to build my web, GIS, and indexing system.

Four months later, about to go to production, during testing I realize I have a 2 SCSI drives, with no hardware RAID setup.

HP has set me the RAID controller, but now the problem.

Is it possible to take the /dev/sda system and convert to /dev/rd/???? without data loss?

Obviously, I do have a nice /dev/sdb (should have been my red flag) sitting empty in the box.



Regards,
Paul Warriner :study: ing frantically!

I think which ever way you do this you would have to wipe the disks, or at least the RAID controller would do it for you when it was initialising the array. If the raid controller you have presents the combined RAID 1 array as /dev/sda then you could possibly use dd to archive the partitions off to some other storage medium and then dd it back after but this is not a nice solution.

However you go about this I think it will be a long winded process there is no simple method I know of to convert a disk into becoming a raid array without destroying whats there. It may be simpler in the long run to do a full backup, reconfigure the drives and do a restore. Just make sure you test your backups before you begin.