Hi there,

I have a 4x 500gb software raid 5 with LVM2 on Debian 4.1 (used this guide as reference). The old mobo has died and I have purchased new parts. I have a few concerns.

1. What will happen to my software raid when I move it over. Will moving the drives over just boot the OS, which leads me to the next...
2. I was an idiot and put the root on the raid. I should've put it on a sep drive (its biting me in the ass now). will the hardware just recognize properly or will it "freak" out.

Is it safe to move or should I put in a 5th drive in there with the OS and hope that I can salvage the raid (is this even possible?, if so how).

So my current, dead, setup:
P4 3.4ghz on a ASUS P4C800-E with 1gb of memory.
I have 4x 500gb drives, 2x connected via the southbridge chipset (Intel 875p) and two via the onboard Promise ide controller.

New setup
Athlon 64 LE-1640 on a Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2H with 2gb of memory
Using the same 4x 500gb drives all 4 connected via the chipset.

Any help is appreciated.

Well the bad news is that it will not just work. You'll see a kernel panic as it boots due to the different hardware.

If I were you I would install a fifth drive and use that for the OS as you've no danger of overwriting the data. I am not sure whether you are saying that you didn't have a separate mount point for /home and/or wherever the data is. If so, I suspect you might be up the creek without a different drive.

I reckon you should be able to set-up a new system and mount all the disks. Exactly how, I think will depend on how they have been partitioned.

Before we go any further can you let us know how the existing disks are partitioned please?