RAID is not a backup, they say, but only now I can see that what I really need is an (external) backup.
So, I would like to convert a (software) RAID-1 partition to a non-RAID partition (ext4) in my Linux system (Debian 7), but I am clueless how to do it.
My goal is to remove one of the two internal drives of the current RAID 1 setup and use it as a external backup drive, so I can preserve the data on another physical place.
Is there any way to do this conversion to non-RAID without formatting the current RAID partition (/home) in the (future) single internal drive?
Thanks for any advice,
Marcio
Best Answer
This is what I would do to safely remove a RAID-1 managed by mdadm:
Run
fdisk -l
. This will tell you how many and which arrays you have. In following steps, I'm assuming you only have/dev/md0
.Run
mdadm --detail /dev/md0
. This will give you information about which physical disks are in use.Run
umount -l /dev/md0
, which will allow you to later stop your RAID. The-l
flag will do the following, as per its man page:Run
mdadm --stop /dev/md0
. This will stop your RAID array.Erase the superblock on each device in the RAID (should be detailed in the command run in step 2).
That should be it.