Setup of a software RAID-1 to an existing system?

[Johan Paul]

Hi all!

This is repost from freebsd-newbies mailing list since this might be a 
more suitable mailing list for my question.

I am pretty new to FreeBSD but thought it might be a nice idea to
migrate from a Linux server to a FreeBSD one.

My question is regarding software RAID-1 for this FreeBSD box. I have
two qually sized IDE hard drives and I installed FreeBSD 4.8 on the 
other one. Now the question is: can I make a RAID-1 array of these
two disks while FreeBSD is installed on the other one (using vinum or
other...)? Or how do I get RAID-1 to work on these two disks? FreeBSD 
got one slice from each disk that occupy the whole disk. Only the first 
disk is partitioned into 4 pieces (details about the partitions might be 
unneccesary...?).

I've read some of the vinum documentation but it is unclear to me if
it is possible to set up a RAID-1 on a running file system - and if my
assumptions are correct, that it is impossible, it is unclear to me
how to set up this software RAID-1?


Regards,

Johan Paul