Difficult situation - mirroring of boot volumes

[ktodorovflagtelecom.com]

Hello Experts,

I have a big problem...

At present time a few of our servers have the boot volume span over 2 physical hard disks.

I would like if possible to break the stripe set and after that mirror the disks without re-installing the OS? The server is N class and does not have spare internal hotswapable hard disk slot but there is a VA storage attached to it from where I can borrow one.

Thanks in advance.

[Pascal Rouchon]

the only way I see to do this is to copy the entire partition on another partition, ex. on the storage. boot on a CD to get a shell and then rebuild your disks by breaking the strippe.

But this is not the procedure i will follow if i were the sysadmin. I prefere to copy all my software on the storage, stop the server pull out the two drives and reinstall the OS on two new drives. like that you are safe because the roolback procedure is easy.


Pascal

[Mladen Despic · Accepted solution]

Hi Kiril,

You can try moving lvols around by mirroring and unmirroring. This should work if you have enough extra disk.

For example, if /dev/vg00/lvolx is on /dev/dsk/cxtxdx and you want to move it to /dev/dsk/cytydy,
you can do:

lvextend -m 1 /dev/vg00/lvolx /dev/dsk/cytydy

and then

lvreduce -m 0 /dev/vg00/lvolx /dev/dsk/cxyxdx

Mladen

[Jon Finley]

If you still have space available on the first (primary) disk, you can use pvmove to move the lvol's from the second disk to the first disk.

Then you would have the second disk free for mirroring.


Jon