Hello experts,

I have some olds RHEL3s servers, and just now realized that they are running using only one disk.

For all of them, the scenario is the same: 2 internal disks with the same size, /boot in a separate partition and other stuff into LVM, like this:

[root@cgli066a root]# cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 3 (Taroon Update 2)


[root@cgli066a root]# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/rootvg/LogVol01 3.9G 1.8G 2.0G 47% /
/dev/cciss/c0d0p1 99M 16M 79M 17% /boot
none 1.9G 0 1.9G 0% /dev/shm
/dev/rootvg/LogVol02 985M 226M 709M 25% /home
/dev/rootvg/LogVol03 88G 1.5G 82G 2% /var
/dev/rootvg/LogVol04 2.0G 174M 1.7G 10% /database


I already copied the partition table from the primary disk to the other:

[root@cgli066a root]# sfdisk -l /dev/cciss/c0d0

Disk /dev/cciss/c0d0: 35697 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0

Device Boot Start End #cyls #blocks Id System
/dev/cciss/c0d0p1 * 0+ 12 13- 104391 83 Linux
/dev/cciss/c0d0p2 13 35696 35684 286631730 8e Linux LVM
/dev/cciss/c0d0p3 0 - 0 0 0 Empty
/dev/cciss/c0d0p4 0 - 0 0 0 Empty
[root@cgli066a root]# sfdisk -l /dev/cciss/c0d1

Disk /dev/cciss/c0d1: 35697 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0

Device Boot Start End #cyls #blocks Id System
/dev/cciss/c0d1p1 * 0+ 12 13- 104391 83 Linux
/dev/cciss/c0d1p2 13 35696 35684 286631730 8e Linux LVM
/dev/cciss/c0d1p3 0 - 0 0 0 Empty
/dev/cciss/c0d1p4 0 - 0 0 0 Empty

Now, I just need to:

1) Make a second boot area (copy the content from /dev/cciss/c0d0p1 to /dev/cciss/c0d1p1)
2) Update grub (not grub2, old grub) --- I don't want to update grub version
3) LVM mirror it's easy for me, don't need this steps

Can you guys please guide me how to make steps 1 and 2?

Thanks and regards,

André

Some notes:

1. RHEL 3 is completely unsupported now https://access.redhat.com/support/po...fe_Cycle_Dates
2. They will also be very vulnerable as no security updates would been been issued for some time
3. Going by the dev names I'd guess they are HP servers and going by your description I reckon the disks should have been setup as RAID 1 (aka mirror) pairs.

My recommendations:

1. In the short term contact HP and/or google for how to set them up as a RAID 1. You may(?) be able to do that (without re-installing them) if they can be set that way at lowlevel ie not using mdadm.
2. Definitely move up to a supported & secure(!) release as soon as you can.

HTH & sorry if that's not what you were hoping for.