Clone RAID 5 machine

['chris']

hi

howto clone linux with RAID 5 on other machine with the same hardware ?
can use one HD from the running system to clone on other machine ?

kind regards
chris

['chris']

our problem is, we cannot cannot switch off the server and boot using any bootable device.

[Uwe Zessin · Accepted solution]

No, you cannot pull out a single disk drive from a RAID-5 set and use it for replication. The disk drive contains only a fraction of the data and parity information.
If you cannot shutdown the server, the only way to copy the data is from within the operating system (kind of 'online' backup). If you're very lucky, the system is running with LVM setup and even has space left to do snapshots.

['chris']

It wasn't LVM setuped on the running system.

[Vitaly Karasik_1]

do you use software or hardware RAID?

['chris']

It's hardware RAID

# cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES release 3 (Taroon)

[Vitaly Karasik_1]

so you should
1) build RAID5 on the new box using RAID utility you get with your server or RAID BIOS interface.
In fact, I guess, you have a few RAID volumes.

2) create linux partitions and clone your data from old machine. You can do it in a few ways - using plain tar, dd, ... or some Ghost-like software, for example http://www.mondorescue.org

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Lots of options.

A good pay for option is acronis

http://www.acronis.com

It can even deal with different hardware where mondo sometimes gets stuck.

SEP

[~sesh]

Another commercial software, guess which?(from HP).. Rapid Deployment Pack!

You can use this to capture the image of your source server and deploy on to the target server. I guess its worth checking out as well. It would be better for larger scale deployments too.

[~sesh]

You can find a lot more info about it here:
http://h18013.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/rdp/services.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN