Expanding a Raid 1
 

I created my raid 1 array using a kickstart script. Unfortunatley I set the size of the disks to 500GB instead of 750Gb.

Is there a way to expand a 500Gb Raid 1 to 750Gb?

I tried removing them one by one and expanding the partitions but when I add them back and run;

mdadm /dev/md0 --grow size=MAX

but it has no effect.

Anyone has this problem?

can you give more details about your disks please? raid1 is a mirror, so you have two disks and have the same on both. what do you expect to expand this with?

I have two 750GB Drives with the following setup:


sda::
sda1 500GB /
sda2 100mb /boot
sda3 1GB Swap
249GB free space

sdb::
sdb2 500GB /
250GB free space

sda1 and sdb1 are in raid 1 formation on /dev/md0 and holds all the server data that I need to keep.

I simply want to add the remaining 249GB to the RAID which is currently not being used as I inititally setup the raid with the wrong sizes.

you're running a 500GB root partition? that's just awful... you really really should look at changing your partitioning layout. personally i'd sugegst reinstalling and partitioning more sensibly. now 750GB of space is presumably for video's and other large media right? that has absolutely no place in the same partition as your core operating system. keep / seperate from /var/my_documents as it were... if you want to keep these files in your /home than making /home 750GB is fine too at a push, but you'll come unstuck sooner or later with a system like that. at the very least change it to this:

sda1 - 100GB /boot
sda2 - 10GB /
sda3 - 1gb swap
sda4 - 740GB /home or /var/share or something

sdb1 - 740GB /home

i would also look at possibly using that asymetric space that md0 can't use as maybe an area to keep a direct copy of /boot and maybe a raid1 version of / seperately...

Ok I am going to setup my partitions like so:

sda1 - 100MB /boot
sda2 - 10GB /
sda3 - 1GB swap
sda4 - 740 /DATA (this is where I keep all my movies, linux installs etc.)

I am still confused at how I can resize the RAID 1 on MD0 or can I not? would I have to delete all the data and start again as I cannot loose the data on this drive.