I use gmirror RAID1 to both assure data redundancy and to create hard-drives for swapping into production servers when major upgrades are needed. But I am struggling with something that should be easy:
If I remove a drive from gmirror, should I then be able mount it as a standalone drive on that or another machine? Specifically, my full drives are mirrored, including O/S and boot section, but I'd like to take one OLD drive out, mount its data partitions standalone, then recover data off it on another temporary machine (running its own o/s of course)
I have tried to do this, but am only able to mount the SLICE (eg: ad6s1), not the individual partitions (eg: ad6s1f). I am thinking that this is because there are no labels on the patitions (verified using bsdlabel)? Gmirror plants its info on the final sectors, but why is the original labelling gone? It was there when I installed the original 0/S....
It seems to me that having a RAID 1 from which I cannot grab a single drive and mount independently for data recovery is less than ideal. I am not an expert system admin though, so any suggestions would be very helpful. What am I doing wrong?
OS is FBSD 7.3-RELEASE-p2
Drives are SATA
If I remove a drive from gmirror, should I then be able mount it as a standalone drive on that or another machine? Specifically, my full drives are mirrored, including O/S and boot section, but I'd like to take one OLD drive out, mount its data partitions standalone, then recover data off it on another temporary machine (running its own o/s of course)
I have tried to do this, but am only able to mount the SLICE (eg: ad6s1), not the individual partitions (eg: ad6s1f). I am thinking that this is because there are no labels on the patitions (verified using bsdlabel)? Gmirror plants its info on the final sectors, but why is the original labelling gone? It was there when I installed the original 0/S....
It seems to me that having a RAID 1 from which I cannot grab a single drive and mount independently for data recovery is less than ideal. I am not an expert system admin though, so any suggestions would be very helpful. What am I doing wrong?
OS is FBSD 7.3-RELEASE-p2
Drives are SATA