At this stage this question is purely theoretical (perhaps a couple of days ago it would have been more pressing).

Is it possible to pick up a RAID set from one machine and move it to another box? (or I suppose lose the boot disk, reinstall the distro and then remount the raid set - which was close to what happened to me).

anything possible but some things really make you question why you would do it. raid relies on the through put from one hard drive to another...you usually do not get same speed across a network. the hardware would have to match (a clone), but then it would just be easier to run a back up program from one machine to the other. There is no real reason to set something like that up. you would have to have bios level compatibility between the two and you would have to reconfigure the firmware of both drives...

baldur

I thought if you use mdadm and create mdadm.conf, you can move the drive anyway as long as you move the mdadm.conf to the new machine as well.

I posted the question having re-initialied the array in question so wanted to know in an abstract sense - no answer was going to save me.

I had built a new machine and wanted to move a 3 disk array from an old machine to the new machine. I had imagined that I could take across the mdadm.conf and make the appropriate /etc/fstab entries and the array would automagically appear - but alas it never showed. It went from bad to worse as I started to play and eventually i initialied and got on with my life.

However, I would still like to know (for the future) is it possible and what the steps would likely be.

Thanks for any help