Building an additional raid
My box already had two hard disks in raid10. Wanted to add two more disks in a second raid. Here is what I did. This was on Ubuntu Trusty.
- Boot with Ubuntu install CD
- Go into recover mode
- Navigate until you hit the partition disk option (had to go forward and backward in the wizard to end up here!)
- Perform the partition as you would on a new system, except only do it for the two new disks and leave the existing untouched
- When asked to specify mount point specify / (root)
- Specifying root is not what I actually wanted as this was a supplementary data disk (set)
- The install (even recover mode) would not let me proceed if I did not have a root partition mount
- Confirm the write to partition table
- The system will start installing the OS on the new root partition! Not what we wanted of course.
- Press reset (Ctl-Alt-Del) in the middle of the install to force reboot!
- Boot back into the system (as before) with your regular boot disk
- Run
fdisk -l
to check that disks are raid are all in place - should be or something went awry - Use
blkid
to determine the UUID of the new raid disk set - Update
/etc/fstab
with mount point (create the mount-point directory first) - Issue a
mount -a
to mount the disks - Remove the frivolous install files that the Ubuntu installer started to copy in the new set of disks
- Issue a
cat /proc/mdstat
to observe raid sync process - Issue a
mdadm –detail –scan
to get the new (and existing ARRAY) details - Update
/etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf
with the new ARRAY details - Run
update-initramfs -u
to add it to the initramfs image
I used the install CD as the process is standard and you can do it via a tool as opposed to commands, that I could not find a good comprehensive set of. It is sort of imperfect in that you have to fool the installer into just creating your raid/partitions and force abort the actual install. However it works and does not have any risk.