RAID 1 Help

[keysersoze]

Hi Guys--

OK, here's what I have... hopefully someone out there has had this experience.

Here at work we have a G5 (Dual 1.8) with a single 80GB Seagate Drive in it. We use this G5 as our webserver. We would like to add another 80GB drive to it (easy enough) and set the two drives to a RAID 1 or mirrored array, in case one fails.

The only time I have created a RAID 1, I had to initialize both disks, in a sense, blasting all information on them to nothing. Is there a way to create a RAID array without initializing the (already in use) system drive? Can I create a RAID and rebuild it without starting from scratch?

If there isn't a way, what's the best way to backup this entire system so that we can place it on the RAID after the RAID is created? I can't go through re-installing the system and apps, because our webserver has all of these different settings and preferences that I don't want to have to re-create. It would be very messy.

Any ideas would be most helpful.

Thanks All!

 

[daveL]

To back it up, use Carbon Copy Cloner (free).

I haven't created a RAID 1 with OS X. I can understand RAID 0 requiring that you start off with virgin drives, but RAID 1 should be able to simply sync up the second (mirror) drive to the original drive. I guess I would back up what you have and try adding the second drive as a mirror.

 

[keysersoze]

To back it up, use Carbon Copy Cloner (free).

I haven't created a RAID 1 with OS X. I can understand RAID 0 requiring that you start off with virgin drives, but RAID 1 should be able to simply sync up the second (mirror) drive to the original drive. I guess I would back up what you have and try adding the second drive as a mirror.

Hi daveL,
Thanks for the suggestion. Will Carbon Copy Cloner back up to a CD-R? I will go hunt it down on versiontracker.

 

[varmit]

I guess that its not destrutive to the first drive, but I guess I'll go home and try it out myself.

 

[keysersoze]

I guess that its not destrutive to the first drive, but I guess I'll go home and try it out myself.

I was hoping to make this RAID tomorrow... if you find an answer, please post! Thanks!

 

[asif786]

Hi daveL,
Thanks for the suggestion. Will Carbon Copy Cloner back up to a CD-R? I will go hunt it down on versiontracker.

If you're backing up the entire system/OS you'll need more than 700mb though..so CDs would be useless.

I would suggest backing up to a small external hard disk - it's more reliable than CDs and much faster too

/asif