Single Drive to Raid0 ---> Best Method?

[mawst]

Heyo?

Ok, so here's the deal. I recently made a large amount of hardware changes to my Gentoo box. Mainly switching my primary hard drive and adding 2 more (4 drives total).

I initially had some problems with my ATA card (due to firmware issues) so I decided (once I got my system to boot) to try out Fedora on the machine.

I setup a raid0 configuration with disk druid, and installed the system. Well, since everything was working nicely, I decided Gentoo was once again in order.

I knew I wanted a raid0 setup again, but I wasn't sure how to do it, and I didn't find any guides until AFTER my installation had completed.

All of my drives are still "Linux Raid Autodetect"

I've even added raid support in my kernel...

To my knowledge I still have to mkraid somewhere... and I have a feeling that destroys data.

So I'm wondering what the best method to go about this is...


Should I tarball my system, send it to another machine on my network, boot through the livecd, mkraid, and then copy my system back over? or do I not have to spend all this time tarballing?


I'm really hoping I didn't just waste all the time I did installing... I'm on 56k and this box is only a 500Mhz with 256mb ram.

Thanks in advance!


-mawst


=====UPDATE=====

I've read the Gentoo Wiki Raid guide, and it's messed up, because you can't run mkraid on a mounted drive,, and I can't enable raid devices without mounting the drive.

(e.g. MAKEDEV md does NOT work from my livecd - and there are no md devices in /dev!)

[zoyd_wheeler]

If you want to use all the disks in a raid-0 array, youd have to first build the array, then make a filesystem on it, and then install whatever you need on it. So you'd have to do the tarball stuff.
However - why do you want to have your system ( / /usr /var etc) on a raid-0 array? You will get an avaiability that is a lowered exponentionally to the number of disks in the array - bad stuff ( i.e loose one, you loose all )
Remember - from the day you install the disk, it is just an issue of time unil it fails - sooner or alter, it will.
If Id do any raid on the "systemdisk", it would be raid 1; otherwise I'd just leave it out of the array, and mount whatever filesystems else on the other disks (after making them into an raid 0 array).

[mawst]

I somehwat consider my Gentoo machine a "hobby box"... but even that said, I could probably get away with just adding the other drives as /home...


I'm still unsure where I need to go from here to acocmplish that though.

[KpR2000]

[mawst]

Howto:

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Gentoo_Install_on_Software_RAID