Clone Mirrored Drives

[Dahak]

I have not done this myself so would like some opinions/options


What would be the best way to clone a mirrored set of drives? The reason why I ask is have a customer who is running out of space and needs to upgrade the drives.

I was thinking of breaking the mirror, clone the single drive to new drive and then recreate the mirror with the 2 new drives.

Thanks

 

[corkyg]

I do this regularly. My data drive is a RAID1 array. I use Acronis TI and boot to the Rescue CDR. It sees the array as a single drive. I clone it to an external USB drive.

When done, I take that USB drive and clone it to my data drive on another computer. In effect, my RAID1 array has two single drive duplicates or clones.

When I upgrade the RAID1 array, I put in the new larger drives - build the array to RAID1 (mirror), then clone the external USB drive to it and it is good to go.

I have also used one of the old RAID1 drives as the source for cloning to the new array. In effect, this is what you propose. It will work just fine.

 

[Rifter]

Acronis is good software for this as mentioned above, will work fine.

 

[Dahak]

Ok thanks for the info

 

[Emulex]

be careful intel matrix raid will clone the signature of the raid to the destination.

so if you the destination back in a ICH raid it may see it's raid tatoo.

On my inspiron which is IDE or RAID (ahci for non-raid elements) that presented a problem because the cloned image thought it was 1/2 of a raid-1 and bumped it out of AHCI mode so i couldn't apply a firmware patch

grr!!