Converting RAID 0 disk to RAID 1

[Paulo A G Fessel]

I have a LPr server with a HP NetRAID adapter running Red Hat Linux 7.1 in hardware RAID 1 mode and I've been requested to send a copy of this installation to another site. In order to duplicate the disk and send a copy offsite, I've taken the following steps:

1) I've broken the original RAID 1 volume in the current server;

2) I took this disk to another machine, reconfigured the HP NetRAID adapter of the new machine to see each disk as a RAID 0 volume;

3) This way, the drives have been seen by NetRAID as independent physical drives, and I could perform a physical copy of the disks (dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=10M in Unix parlance);

4) Reinstalled lilo by means of a recovery diskette and voil??, the new disk boots and works ok.

What I'd like to know is: is it possible to convert this single disk to a RAID 1 array in a HP NetRAID adapter without loss of data?

If not, could I use my original server to regenerate the disks by offling the first disk, duplicating it (by means of substition of the first disk for another and resynchronizating the array) and repeat the process for the second disk?

TIA,
Paulo Fessel

[Enes Dizdarevic]

Yes it is possible to convert RAID0 to RAID1 without loss of data. In windows enviroment the best way is to use netraid assistent. If there is a netraid assistent for linux use it. Select your existing logical drive (raid0) and a new physical drive (ready status) and find menu option change raid level/upgrade capacity. If there is no netraid assistent for linux you have to restart server, go to netraid express tools by pressing control-M during boot and find similar option in netraid express tools menus.

[Marco Hogeveen · Accepted solution]

Unfortunately there's no netraid assistant for Linux and migarting RAID levels doesn't work from Netraid Express Tools (Ctrl-M).
I think the only possibility for you is to boot from Navigator CD and enter Netraid Assistant from there.
From within Netraid assistant you can drag 'n drop the new disk (READY state) to the logical drive (RAID0). Then select RAID1 as the RAID level and the migration begins.
Remember that this only works if you have only 1 logical drive on your array, if you have multiple logical drives on 1 array then it's not possible to migrate to RAID1.

Marco.