Hi. I have an Ubuntu 10.04 server which runs a weatherstation for a sailing club (amongst other things!). Been trying to upgrade from single tired disc to RAID 1 array but despite reading many thousands of words written on the subject, have failed miserably :-( So, in desperation, have started from scratch and done a fresh install of 10.04 server to the new discs & configured RAID from the install process. This is working fine :-)

All that is required now is to copy files, software & configurations to new array from old single disc. My question is, which files/directories should I avoid over-writing? Desperately don't want to knobble my new RAID array!
TIA
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Richard

None. Software raid array data is held in metadata on the block device. There are no essential configuration files. /etc /mdadm.conf can be used as a backup configuration file but it's not required.

Oh dear, my worst fears...
Having copied contents of old disc onto new array, server won't boot. Says:

Gave up waiting for root device. <snip>
ALERT! /dev/disk/by-uuid/<UUID> does not exist. Dropping to a shell.

This is about as far as I got previously. Where do I go from here, please?

How did you copy it? I would have transferred just the necessary setting files and the content of the website and not the complete disk.

I thought I could save myself the trouble of re-installing mailman, motion, digitemp, cli php etc etc by just copying the entire old single disc over to the array via a tarball, which is why I asked the question of which files I shouldn't trample on! I think I have learnt the hard way (again) to keep copious notes of how I did things...