Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

Looks like I spoke too soon Monday night. I get home Tuesday (after watching Batman Begins … enjoyed that one) to find the machine down again.

Turns out it wasn’t the motherboard (although I’m really glad to be rid of that SiS chipset) - it was the primary drive. Not what you want to happen to your web and imap server.

Fortunately, when I built the box, I’d put the disks into a RAID1 setup, and the second disk hadn’t died (although I’m taking no chances, as both disks were of the same make!) Unfortunately, I hadn’t put the boot partition onto RAID1 - but with a minimal install CD to hand, it didn’t take long to get /boot recreated.

Most of the time was taken reading up on how to recover from a physical disk failure, and then copying all the data from the surviving RAID1 disk onto one of the two new disks I bought at lunchtime. (There’s no way I’m risking that data by trying to re-use the surviving disk. Much safer to make a complete copy onto a new disk, and then rebuild the RAID1 array by adding a second new disk. Anything goes wrong, all I’ve lost is time - not the data).

I haven’t actually rebuilt the RAID array yet. Gareth recently gave me a demo of EVMS, and I figure this is the perfect opportunity to convert this box over to EVMS. Before I do that, I need to do a bit of reading and satisfy myself that recovering data from an EVMS-managed RAID is every bit as easy as recovering data from a normal Linux RAID.