I've got my Ubuntu 8.10 (Ibex) Server running on it's own box. I've got PuTTY installed and working from my WinXP Pro box, and I've got Webmin installed on the server and working from my WinXP Pro box. I built the Ubuntu box with a single HDD (80 GB), and it's working ok (no problems, yet).

I have a 4 disk RAID5 array that I created & populated in OpenSuSE 11.0 (I removed the OS drive & installed a blank one to use for Ubuntu, and installed Ubuntu on the blank drive without the 4 RAIDed drives attached - I didn't want to corrupt the data accidentally).

So, I'd like to mount the RAID5 array using Webmin, so that I can have access to the data contained therein.

I've looked over the instructions from Webmin here, but am apprehensive because item #2 says:

"The directory should be either non-existent or empty, as any files that it currently contains will be hidden once the filesystem is mounted."

Likewise, item #6 in the instructions says:

"If any of the partitions on your system are labeled, you can mount one by selecting the Partition labeled option and choosing the one you want. Labels are explained further in chapter 8. If your system has any RAID devices configured (as explained in chapter 8), you can select the RAID device option and choose the one you want to mount from the menu. If you are using LVM, a list of all available logical volumes will appear next to the LVM logical volume option for you to select from. Alternately, you can click on the Other device option and enter the path to the device file for your filesystem, like /dev/hda2."

and I'm wondering if that's the right way to go.

If I had been smart & not populated the data drive, I'd have just put a drop of test data on it & have been able to make my attempts without prejudice to risking lost data. But, I don't want to lose the data, so I'm asking questions first. I'm SURE there's a way to safely mount the data in one Linux environment that was created in a different Linux environment. I did it with OpenSuSE using YaST when I did a re-install of OpenSuSE. But, I'm in new territory with Webmin and would appreciate some encouragement and especially assurance.

In respect of item 2, that's standard mount behaviour. For example, if my /home has a whole lot of user data in it, and I issue "mount /dev/sdb1 /home", then I will see whatever is in /dev/sdb1 if I type "ls /home", not the original user data. The data are still there, just not accessible while a device is mounted there.

A quick "umount /home" followed by "ls home" will reveal the original user data.

Well, the mount point on my RAID array is NW_DATA - NOT something that would normally be created by Linux. So, I'm probably safe to mount it. Now that you've given me the idea, I'm going to remove my OpenSuSE OS drive and put the Ubuntu one back in, and try the mount manually - from PuTTY. I'm trying to achieve enough confidence in this thing to disconnect the monitor, keyboard, & mouse - well, I don't need the mouse at all with just a CLI on the server!