Managing RAID and LVM with Linux. Actually, there is a cool trick to be able to extend a raidlvm scheme I got this from slashdot. If youre using Linux software RAID, carve your drives into multiple partitions, build RAID arrays over those, then use LVM to weld them into a larger pool of storage. It may seem silly to break the drives up into paritions, just to put them back together again, but it buys you a great deal of flexibility down the road. Rosetta. Suppose, for example, that you had three 5. GB drives in a RAID 5 configuration, no hot spare. That gives you 1. TB of usable storage. Now suppose youre just about out of space, and you want to add another drive. How do you do it In order to construct a new, four disk array, you have to destroy the current array. That means you need to back up your data so that you can restore it to the new array. If there were a cheap and convenient backup solution for storing nearly a terabyte, this topic wouldnt even come up. I have a machine where I want to create a clone of the primary disk and save it on a secondary internal disk. After a little reading, I decided to try Clonezilla. System Windows 7 HDDs 500GB, 2TB, and 4TB NonRaid Tools CloneZilla v1. Required Must Run From Bootable DVD and not write ANYTHING to. Managing RAID and LVM with Linux v0. Last modified Friday November 9, 2012. I hope to turn this into a general easy to follow guide to setting up RAID5 and LVM. You can try another free portable file copier software Exshail CopyCare from. Main feature is Preview list of files before copying with seven. The ultimate open source software list, including games to website editors, office tools to education over 1,300 open source software applications. Clonezilla Software Raid 1' title='Clonezilla Software Raid 1' />If, instead, you had cut each 5. GB drive into ten 5. GB partitions, created ten RAID 5 arrays each of three 5. GB partitions and then used LVM to place them all into a single volume group, when it comes time to upgrade, you will have another option. As long as you have free space at least equal in size to one of the individual RAID arrays you can use pvmove to instruct LVM to migrate all of the data off of one array, then take that array down, rebuild it with a fourth partition from the new disk, then add it back into the volume group. Do that for each array in turn and at the end of the process youll have 1. TB, and not only will all of your data be safely intact, your storage will have been fully available for reading and writing the whole time Note that this process isnt particularly fast. I did it when I added a fifth 2. GB disk to my file server, and it took nearly a week to complete. A backup and restore would have been faster assuing I had something to back up to. But it only took about 3. I just let it run, checking on it occasionally. And my kids could watch movies the whole time. For anyone whos interested in trying it, the basic steps to reconstruct an array are as follows. This example will assume were rebuilding devmd. Move all data off of devmd. Remove devmd. 3 from the volume group. Remove the LVM signature from devmd. Stop the array. mdadm zero superblock devmd. Remove the md signature from the disk. Create the new array. Prepare devmd. 3 for LVM use. Add devmd. 3 into the array. In order to make this easy, you want to make sure that you have at least one arrays worth of space not only unused, but unassigned to any logical volumes. I find its a good idea to keep about about 1. Then, when I run out of room in some volume, I just add the 0. ALWAYS have 1 arrays worth of freespace dont accidentally go over. Im currently running raid 5 on 4 3. GB hdds. Ive broken them up into 1. GB chunks and consequently have 1. Clonezilla not able to mount drive I have a machine where I want to create a clone of the primary disk and save it on a secondary internal disk. After a little reading, I decided to try Clonezilla Live, but Im running into the strangest error and have no idea why. After starting up and choosing the keymap and the like, I choose device image to save an image of a drive. I then choose local dev, since I want to use an internal device. It prompts me to plug in any USB devices and press Enter. I just press Enter since I dont want to use this. Clonezilla informs me I need to choose a disk to mount as homeparimag. Im presented with 2 disks to choose from. One is the disk I want to clone sdb. NTFS partition, and the other is where I want to save the image sda. FAT3. 2 partition. Please dont ask why the drives are assigned those letters and numbers. This machine was given to me like that. I choose sda. FAT drive. Im prompted to choose a directory for the Clonezilla image. Im only presented with Topdirectoryinthelocaldevice, so I press Enter to select it. I then see the following error Clonezilla image home directory homepartimag is not a mounting point Failed to mount other device as homepartimag Im then given the option to continue anyway, but I dont know what will happen if I do. This doesnt really give me much information about what the problem is. I would appreciate any insight.