I'd like to move two existing external RAID drives from my OS X box to Slackware. The drives are identical HFS+ format, software RAID 1 in USB/Firewire enclosures. They've worked just fine for quite awhile.

I'd like to keep the data that's currently on the drives. Is it possible to move these over to Slackware as-is, or do I need to reformat the drives and recreate the RAID array?

Slackware (2.4.26 kernel) seems to see the USB enclosures:
Jan 2 15:57:50 pavilion kernel: scsi1 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
Jan 2 15:57:50 pavilion kernel: sda: [mac] sda1 sda2 sda3 sda4
Jan 2 15:57:50 pavilion kernel: scsi2 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
Jan 2 15:57:50 pavilion kernel: sdb: [mac] sdb1 sdb2 sdb3 sdb4

I've tried various /etc/raidtab configurations along these lines (sda3 and sdb3 are the data partitions):
raiddev /dev/md0
raid-level 1
nr-raid-disks 2
nr-spare-disks 0
device /dev/sdb3
raid-disk 0
device /dev/sda3
failed-disk 1

HFS+ support is compiled into the kernel -- I've mounted HFS volumes before.

Any attempt to 'raidstart' or mount md0 gives me these sorts of messages:
/dev/md0: Invalid argument
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/md0,

In messages, I see:
kernel: [events: 00000000]

Any ideas? Am I wasting my time?

Scott

In another forum, the only reply I received was:
"Where you could probably read the HD, Software RAID1 uses type fd, which these are not."

Sounds right. I haven't found any solution except copying the data off and reformatting the drives as a Linux RAID array.

Software RAID has its disadvantages like not be able to used on another system. Yes, you are wasting your time and probably destroying your data in the process. You have to copy the data to another medium that is similar or larger in capacity. Then you can create the RAID 1 array. If the firewire device has hardware RAID (some do), you do not have to do anything.