dying disk

[Matthew Seaman]

On 06/11/2010 09:35, Dick Hoogendijk wrote:
> My system disk is dying. No problem here. I know how to move a FreeBSD
> system to new hardware. I have a question though about my GEOM mirror.
> The system now had one geom mirror consisting of two 1Tb drives. How can
> I move that mirror over to the Fbsd system on the new hardware. I guess
> I don't know the right steps to take on a new fbsd system for an
> existing geom mirror. Any help is welcome.

Do you mean physically moving over the disk hardware behind the gmirror
from one machine to another?

Well, assuming that the processors on the old and new machines are
binary compatible, it's just a matter of hooking up both drives to the
new system[*].  It doesn't matter if they end up with different
underlying device names -- so long as the kernel can taste the geom
metadata on both drives it can reconstruct your gmirror.  If the gmirror
contains the root FS, it's actually easier than moving a traditionally
configured system on a single drive, since you won't have to fiddle
about rewriting /etc/fstab and teaching the bootloader the new place to
mount the root directory from.

It's much the same effect when moving ZFS RAID sets between systems --
as you might hope, since this is basic functionality required when
setting up hot-swap and high-availability disk systems.  Similarly,
using glabel helps make moving single drives between systems (eg. USB
memory sticks) much more pleasurable.

	Cheers,

	Matthew

[*] Or you could just move one drive from your gmirror plus install a
blank drive which you could later add to the mirror and resynch.

-- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                   7 Priory Courtyard
                                                  Flat 3
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey     Ramsgate
JID: matthew at infracaninophile.co.uk               Kent, CT11 9PW

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