In the course of rebuilding a customer’s Panther Xserve G5 on a 2 drive software raid to Tiger on a 3 drive hardware RAID, we needed to
migrate the data quickly and efficiently. We didn’t need to upgrade the OS, but simply do a fresh install.
What I wanted to do was to install the RAID card, hook two of the drives up to card, leaving one of the main drives connected to the system bus.
I intended to try and create a degraded RAID 5 set with the two drives, then copy the data from the main drive over. Then shutdown, hook up the third drive and have the raid card start to rebuild the array on the fly.
This would give me the fastest way of copying over the data from the system.
Alas, it was not to be. the megaraid cli program complained that I didn’t have enough members to create the RAID 5 set:
# megaraid -create R5 -drive 1 2
MEGARAID CLI version 1.0.12
Insufficient Drives 2 for RAID5
INSUFFICIENT/WRONG argument found to complete command
I ended up having to copy the data to both the other server under FWTD, and copying to a connected Firewire disk.
In the end, the RAID 5 device was created with all 3 drives and is running smoothly.