February 2, 201610 yr I've been looking around and I'm a bit confused and don't want to screw anything up or waste a lot of time so I wonder if someone can offer a simple suggestion. I have a existing array of 13 data disks some are formatted reiserfs, the newest ones formatted XFS ... I want to replace disk 10 which is formatted reiserfs with a new larger disk and have it formatted XFS ... There's no data or shares on the existing disk, it's all been moved to other locations, but I'm assuming that if I just pop in a a new drive it's going to be formatted in the reiserfs format as the one it was replacing was ... is that correct? If so how can I replace it and have it updated to XFS?
February 2, 201610 yr Community Expert If there's no data on it then you can either format it to XFS then rebuild to a larger disk, or rebuild to a larger disk then reformat that larger disk to XFS. Either way parity is maintained.
February 2, 201610 yr So I'll have the option to format it ... cool, thanks. You always have the option to change the disk format, not just when you change disks. If you change it to something other than auto or the current format type, it will offer to format the drive when you start the array. The format option doesn't care about existing files, so be careful. It will happily format a full drive.
February 2, 201610 yr Author mmmm nope I don't ... I must be missing something. I put the larger disk in, selected it as device 10 and it only allows me start the array and rebuild it as a reiserfs disk ... I cant find options to format it anywhere.
February 2, 201610 yr As trurl stated, you need to let the drive rebuild and then format it as XFS. If you didn't want to rebuild the drive as reiserfs first you needed to format the old drive as XFS before you replaced it.
February 2, 201610 yr Author Actually I think he said I could reformat and then rebuild ... perhaps I misunderstood and he meant format the old drive ??
February 2, 201610 yr Actually I think he said I could reformat and then rebuild ... perhaps I misunderstood and he meant format the old drive ?? Yes, you would need to format the old reiser drive to xfs then put in the new larger drive and let it rebuild.
February 2, 201610 yr mmmm nope I don't ... I must be missing something. I put the larger disk in, selected it as device 10 and it only allows me start the array and rebuild it as a reiserfs disk ... I cant find options to format it anywhere. It will only offer to format it if you change the file system type for the disk, which can only be changed while the array is stopped.
February 2, 201610 yr Actually I think he said I could reformat and then rebuild ... perhaps I misunderstood and he meant format the old drive ?? Yes just a minor misunderstanding. Either way let it finish the rebuild as a reiserfs disk, then stop your array, and choose to format the disk... to XFS.
February 3, 201610 yr Author Okay, done and done ... thanks for the help folks. If you don't mind a part II question: so now that I have several empty XFS formatted drives available is there a relatively simple way to move an entire share and its contents from the drives it's currently located on to the new ones? I was going to just start copying but it's a lot of files spread out over 5 drives and was hoping there might be a quicker way.
February 3, 201610 yr Just so I understand. You have something like. "Movies" that has movies across disk 1, 2, and 3. And you want to move them from those locations to the new XFS formatted disks, lets say disk 4 5 6? There are a few ways to do this. You could do a mv /mnt/disk1/Movies /mnt/disk4/Movies for each disk that you have data on but want to remove. This is safe and won't cause the user share copy bug, but this many small moves not one big move, (You could put more the one disk on disk4 if disk4 can has the space... IE point disks 1 and 2 at disk 4 with the copy... and consolidate files some. This ignores split level and high water and all that logic and is the "manual" approach. You could also create a temporary user share that excludes the disks you want to remove and do a copy from your original share to the temporary share. Then delete the original and move back into the original share.
February 3, 201610 yr Author *ugh* I was hoping for something a little more elegant, it's actually about 9.6 TB of TV Shows each with their own folder and multiple season sub folders. That's going to be a whole lot of copying either way and then the problem of my Kodi library being wiped clean. Oh well, best get started I suppose.
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.