Transplant root, swap and home to md array ?

After having experienced (again) disk failures with my md/raid5 system, I reinstalled my system (openSuse 11.2) on a new 1 TB drive (raid-less).
Now, after having new disks for setting up my md-raid again, I would prefer not to start over again, but to transfer my running system onto these to-be-built md-raid arrays.

Shouldn’t it be possible to boot from a CD (e.g. SystemRescue CD), create the md-disks, dd the sda# (#=1,2,3) partitions to the newly generated md# (#=0,1,2) partitions, then to make some changes to some system files and to boot the system from the md array then ?

Or am I totally naive?

Any comment is welcome!

hardy59

Hi there,

well i think your are both, naive an right!

of course you could copy all the content of your sdaX disks to
an new disk, set up the grub and boot from that.

I think you even could tar all the stuff and untar it at the new
diskspace, editing the /ets/fstab file and reinstall grub to the
disk.

You only should take a look at the permissions of the files, any
name changes at the disks you must change in the /etc files
(such as grub root partition, fstab file etc.)

Than it should work, but i really dont know, we clone some
virtual machines that way, when setting up new ones, but no
guarantee!

Greetz Joerg

Hi Joerg!
Thanks a lot for your comments.
Looks like the whole mission is a bit too complex and risky for me…
However, I could give it a try - without changing my non-raid configuration - and then see what happens :
Cheers,
hardy59