mdadm RAID 1 Migration

I’m migrating our work server over to a complete RAID setup (software) and needed to find a way to migrate the system partitions over to RAID 1 with a minimum of hassle. I found this how-to and was able to follow most of it verbatim for my test run, but I thought I’d post the actual steps I followed here for future reference.

I had a spare drive that exactly matched the drive currently in my office machine (Seagate ST3200822A), so I just did a parted /dev/hda print and copied the exact start/end of each partiton over to the new drive. Edit: Make sure you set the ‘Linux Raid’ flag on your partitions being used for the arrays. At boot (or module insertion), the kernel will automagically setup the arrays and needed devices making the Gentoo init patch below completely un-needed. Doh!

I then created a degraded RAID 1 array by running mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level 1 --raid-devices=2 missing /dev/hdb5 and verified it had been setup using cat /proc/mdstat.

I created my xfs filesystem on the new array and mounted it on /mnt/tmp so I could copy over my data from the live partition using cd /home && tar cf - .| tar -C /mnt/tmp -xf - and grabbed a smoke while I waited for that to finish.

The final step in creating the array was to add the old partition to the new array and rebuild it using mdadm /dev/md0 -a /dev/hda5. The rebuilding process took about 15 minutes for a 38G partition and a successful mount verified all had gone well.

Edit: Just make sure you have your array partitions marked as above and the kernel md drivers do the rest…

I decided to reboot to test that things had indeed gone as smoothly as I thought and had a rude awakening. I had forgotten to edit /etc/mdadm.conf and add my arrays, so after a quick edit I tried rebooting again and watched in horror as md0 was activated, but 1 and 2 failed. Did a bit of digging on the system and discovered that udev was creating the device nodes as /dev/md/x with a symlink from /dev/mdx at activation. mdadm has two issues with this currently, the first being it won’t activate an array from a scan if the device node doesn’t exist and the second is that the ‘–auto’ param pukes (instead of assuming it’s setup already) if it sees a symlink. I started to edit the checkfs init script to correct the issue manually, but found a patch on the Gentoo bugzilla that fixed everything…