The Rebuild Starteth
My new computer showed up yesterday, in a bunch of boxes. I assembled it yesterday and then started installing Linux on it today. We shall see how it goes.
One of the interesting challenges I have already faced with this machine is how to set up RAID with only one hard disk. You see, I have a second hard disk to put into the new computer, but it’s kinda busy serving up my stupid blog, and my e-mail, and all the rest. So I need to find a way to make this transition as smooth as possible.
This may not work, so don’t assume I’m an expert… but my current approach is to build a RAID1 array on the new computer, with only one hard disk in the array. Yes it would be dumb to leave it this way, but my idea is that when the new machine is all configured, I can just rsync all my data from the old machine to the new machine. Then I can turn off the old box and pull the HDD from it, drop it into the new machine, and add it into the RAID1 array.
And of course I will keep a backup just in case something goes horribly wrong…
August 9th, 2007 at 4:44 pm
Turns out this approach didn’t work so great. Mandriva’s installation procedure can’t handle installing the bootloader onto a RAID partition. So I will do this the same way everybody else does it… set up the system as usual, then migrate it to a RAID1 setup.