mdadm: what a cool utility.

mdadm is really a cool utility. I decided to move my 6 drive RAID 5 array from my normal workstation to a fileserver stuck somewhere in the attic. prompted in no small part by excess heat and noise in my little office. The fileserver is an old dual Xeon pIII running Debian Sarge that should suffice.

Anyway I umounted the array, stopped it and turned it off. Plugged it into the new server. Booted it. I then just ran:

mdadm --assemble /dev/md1 /dev/sd[cdefgh]and off it goes!! Since the array was never degraded, it doesn’t even need to be resynced.

I then mounted it as usual and Bob is most deffo your uncle!

This is the first time I have installed Debian for 3 years. I am pretty impressed by the new Debian Installer. More or less 1 hour from burning the CD to booting the machine. Nice!