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cloning system from single disk to RAID

jojo69

jojo69

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Sep 13, 2009
Messages
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Working on one of the older systems here, system is on an IDE drive and I want to move it to a SATA RAID1 I set up. I tried clonezilla live. It recognized the disks individually, not as a RAID so I had to clone on to each of them.

Booted back into windows, it saw the RAID with the folders and data cloned over. Kind of surprising actually, I was not at all sure that was going to work.

Then I used parted magic to grow the partitions on the RAID drives. That went well and again booting to the old system disk windows sees the, now larger, RAID. I thought I had it licked.

Go to BIOS and set the RAID to boot and I get a "disk read error"

Any advise on how to actually make this work?
 
I would do this

1. leave the IDE disk and the two SATA drives in your system and remove all other disks
1. make a SATA raid in BIOS
2. Boot clonezilla into the shell
3. Use dd or ddrescue to copy the data from the ide drive to the fakeraid device

The hardest part of step 3 will be determining what drive is the source and what the destination array is.

To determine the source

hdparm -I /dev/sda

hdparm -I /dev/sdb

...

or smartctrl /dev/sda
smartctrl /dev/sdb
smartctrl /dev/sdc

can help


The destination disk I believe will be

/dev/mapper/SOMENAMEHERE

ls -al /dev/mapper can help with that

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FakeRaidHowto

After you get to this point we can help with dd/ddrescue.
 
Although when I think of this after creating the array in the BIOS clonezilla may see the array as a single volume.
 
no, with the RAID created in BIOS both clonezilla and parted magic see the array as individual disks, reading your link but it seems more concerned with installing linux on a RAID
 
I wanted you to get a basic understanding of the /dev/mapper/device so that you can understand what device to use as the destination device for the bit for bit copy using dd or ddrescue.
 
ls -al /dev/mapper returns

total 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 100 Sep 30 09:47 .
drwxr-xr-x 15 root root 3280 Sep 30 09:47 ..
crw---------- 1 root root 10,236 Sep 30 09:47 control
brw-rw----- 1 root disk 254, 0 Sep 30 09:47 nvidia_bdifeada
brw-rw----- 1 root disk 254, 1 Sep 30 09:47 nvidia_bdifeada1


it is an nvidia RAID chipset so "nvidia_bdifeada" makes some sense, but it seems to see both drives independently
 
Can you give me the output of this:

Code: 
fdisk -l /dev/mapper/dev/mapper/nvidia_bdifeada
 
-bash: fdisk: command not found

lol, I guess I need to load a more comprehensive OS than the clonezilla shell
 
If the current contents of the raid are unimportant to you we can try to continue. Did you figure out what drive was the ide drive?
 
Code: 
ddrescue -f -g /dev/sdb /dev/mapper/dev/mapper/nvidia_bdifeada /root/log.txt
 
ddrescue not found, if I boot to a real distro, say #!, will the drive designations be the same or will I have to rediscover them?
 
I would be safe and rediscover them.

I recommend sysrescuecd

http://www.sysresccd.org/Download


This would be safer anyways. Because ddrescue does not warn you if you reversed the source and destination so you must be very careful. I always double check before starting that command..
 
bumping, I know this is probably bog simple, but I really don't want to fuck this up
 
to clarify, I downloaded and burned a CD of systemrescue as drescherjim recommended and it does indeed offer a more complete shell environment

I admit I am really weak at linux, sure I could just create the directory the above command wants to output to, my concern is that as I am trying to create a bootable situation on the nvidia_bdifeada RAID volume there may be arcane boot sector stuff going on that I do not understand.
 
Does the following exist:

/dev/mapper/dev/mapper/nvidia_bdifeada
 
Last edited:
hold on, I was just getting to the shell and you edited out the command...lol
 
Wait a minute.

It should be /dev/mapper/nvidia_bdifeada not /dev/mapper/dev/mapper/nvidia_bdifeada
 
jojo69 said:
hold on, I was just getting to the shell and you edited out the command...lol
Click to expand...

Sorry. When I first read your reply I though that the source was the problem not the output.. I am not having a good day today. I hurt pretty bad from some roof work that I did on my parents house yesterday.
 
ok, cool, let me try that

ouch, I feel your pain man, climbed 2@ 250 ft towers yesterday
 
yeah 41GB so far, I think the source disk is 160G ddrescue is thorough, and slow
 
It will make a bit for bit copy of every sector on the drive. Even if the sector is unused by the filesystem.
 
finished the clone, switched BIOS to boot off the RAID

"A disk read error occurred"

same as before...ugh, I can't be the first guy tried to do this
 
hey, I really appreciate your help, I learned some stuff and the systemrescuecd is a nice addition to the toolkit

maybe I should break down and buy another cheap win7 key instead of continuing to clone this lost-key XP install on to newer hardware...lol

still, it bugs me that I can't figure out how to make this clone boot,

anyone else?
 
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