Topic: Mounting IDE drive on sme7 with SATA drives?

[chris burnat]

As a result of a major hardware failure, I have to restore some 60GB of data from a vs6 system (IDE) onto a new sme7 system (SATA).  The data on the IDE drive  is stored in a couple of ibays. The sme7 system consist of 2 x 200GB SATA drives RAID1 (hda and hdc). What is the procedure to mount this IDE drive onto the new system to facilitate transfer of data from the old drive to the new RAID1 array? Many thanks for assistance with this, I am bushed...

[chris burnat]

When connecting the old Vs6 IDE drive onto one of the IDE controller, this drive takes precedence over the thwo SATA drives of the new VS7 system.  The server try to boot from the old Vs6 system, not what is required...  Should I disable/delete the boot partition of the old Vs6 IDE drive?

[gordonr]

When connecting the old Vs6 IDE drive onto one of the IDE controller, this drive takes precedence over the thwo SATA drives of the new VS7 system.  The server try to boot from the old Vs6 system, not what is required...  Should I disable/delete the boot partition of the old Vs6 IDE drive?

It depends on when it is taking precedence. If it's in boot order, you should be able to fix that in the BIOS boot settings.

However, if it's during RAID assembly, you are hitting this nasty bug:

http://bugs.contribs.org/show_bug.cgi?id=961

There's a lot of history in this bug, but in summary, the RAID assembly order depends on disk probing order. It's not something we can fix - this has to be fixed by the kernel maintainers  (who have already stated that the behaviour is wrong but not easily fixable).

The workaround is to toggle the partition table entries on the old disk from "raid autodetect" to "Linux". They then won't get assembled incorrectly into a RAID array.

[chris burnat]

Thank you Gordon, I had hit the bug you mentionned, and with your workaround got away with it.  Just finished the restore process, 45 min for 50GB+ of data.  All appears to be there. Regards, chris.