Fresh HDD space arrived
Two years have past since I installed two 2TB disks on my home server. Last week I squeezed out the remaining bytes of my data volume, so I ordered two brand new 3TB Western Digital harddisks (WD30EZRX) to replace the current 2TB ones. Two things prevented an upgrade as easy as the previous one. First I wanted to do a clean install of Debian 7.1 “Wheezy” and secondly wanted to switch to UEFI boot and GPT, so I had to create a new partition table and a new EFI boot partition.
System specification (before upgrade):
- Intel DQ67EPB3 board
- Debian 6.0.7 “Squeeze”
- 2x WD20EARS (in software RAID1 and LVM2)
I have described the way I accomplished this task (in not so great detail):
- Shutdown the system
- Remove both disks
- Install both new disks
- Startup the system and enter the BIOS setup to enable ‘EFI boot’
- Boot the Debian installer from USB (debian-7.1.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso)
- Choose Advanced options → Expert install
- Choose Manual partitioning
- Configure both drives to use GPT as the partition table
- Be sure to create a EFI partition on both disks as the first partition
- Create RAID (MD) devices
- Create LVM devices
- Finish the installation
- Shutdown and attach one of the old drives
- Issue ‘mdadm –examine –scan’ to make sure the old md devices are listed
- Issue ‘mdadm -A /dev/md3 /dev/sdc4’ to assemble to old md devices
- Issue ‘mdadm –assemble –run /dev/md3’ to mark it active
- Issue ‘vgchange -a y’ to mark the LV available
- Mount the volume ‘mount –read-only /dev/data/data /mnt/oldinstall’
- Copy the contents of the old disk to the new volume
- Shutdown to remove the old disk
- Startup and you’re done
Hope another two years will pass before I need to go through the process again.