Re: [cobalt-users] replicating a raq2 drive

[Jeff Lasman <blists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Monday 19 January 2004 11:49 am, webmgr wrote:

> Got the *weird noises* coming from my RAQ2 hdd.
> As I have powerquest Drive copy (4.0) then I'm guessing
> that I could follow this method to clone it....
...<stuff snipped>...

The RaQ2 uses ext2 formatted drives.

If PowerQuest Drive Copy 4.0 can clone ext2 formatted drives to a larger 
size drive, then yes you can.  I'm not sure if it can or not, but the 
documentation should tell you.

> 1. get a spare drive
> 2. setup a spare PC with dual IDE support
> 3. set new drive to slave
> 4. Setup powerquest drive copy to run from floppy.
> 5. shutdown the RAQ2
> 6. pull the RAQ2 drive, install into the new pc as master.
> 7. boot from drive copy floppies
> 8. copy it without hiding any drives.
> 9. pull the new drive, unslave it, install in RAQ2
>
> But wondered if there were a majic 'other option'

There is another option that may work, if RaQ2s don't need anything 
written on the drive boot sectors (Gerald, do you know?), and it 
doesn't even require you shut down the box or even take it out of the 
data center...

If you've got two linux systems, say "RaQ" and "box", and you've got ssh 
installed on both...

And if you can install the new drive on "box" as hdb, at /mnt/second, 
then you could use ssh between the two boxes.  You'd have to know how 
to format hdb with an ext2 filesystem and create the partitions (using 
the linux fdisk) first.

We just did this to copy a system with 22 Gig of data from a data center 
to a new box, for one of our clients.

On our systems (much faster than RaQ2 systems) the load never even got 
above 0.04 on either machine, running at full T-1 speed (my speed limit 
here at my office).  The box in the data center continued to perform 
flawlessly.

There are a lot of details you'd need to consider to go this route, 
though, not the least of which is that files that change while you do 
the copy wouldn't be up-to-date (for example email and logs).

Jeff
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