Resize RAID1 array without knowing which disk is which

I want to grow my RAID1 array from 2x250GB to 2x500GB. The following resource has helped my a lot.

Update

It all worked, allthough the kernel decided to crash during the offline ext4 resize. But I finally have my extra disk space

% df -h | grep md6

before: /dev/md6 77G 67G 6.7G 91% /vol

after: /dev/md6 306G 67G 224G 23% /vol

Now to my problem/solution:

On Linux you often have the following problem: You are looking or touching some piece of hardware and you are asking yourself: “is this card eth0 or eth1?” or “is this disk /dev/sda or /dev/sdb?”.

In my case I didn’t know which disk had what device name. Solution?

Rip out a random disk and replace it with an empty new disk (no partition) and hope for the best.

Some scary moments come to pass

Well after rebooting, I got the question if I wanted to boot the degraded array. After saying ‘yes’ I was back into my system.

Turns out I had ripped out /dev/sda. Time to mark this on the case:

Now to restore the partition table of the old disk to the new one:

sfdisk /dev/sda < sda.sfdisk

Where sda.sfdisk is the partition info saved with sfdisk -d /dev/sda.

Now my last partition on the disk was /dev/sda4 - luckily not in a logical partition, as I don’t know how to extend that. So I could easily delete this partition and recreate it so that it fills the entire size of the new disk. Some simple fdisk-foo will help you here.

Now re-add all the partitions back to the RAID1 array:

mdadm --add /dev/md0 /dev/sda1

And this for all 8 partitions.

And then… we wait for the RAID1 rebuild:

watch cat /proc/mdstat

Just to be sure I re-installed grub with grub-install /dev/sda.

Rinse and repeat for the other disk and after that has finished rebuilding I can resize the file system on /dev/sda4. Which is

% grep sda4 /proc/mdstat 
md6 : active raid1 sda4[2] sdb4[1]

e2fsck -f /dev/md6
resize2fs /dev/md6

Note this was all done with kernel 2.6.29.1 and the ext4 file system. See this post or some info on that. And only 1 kernel crash during the offline resize!