sfdisk, RAID

4 Dec 2008

A useful tool I came across last night (thanks Rodrigo) – sfdisk – “Partition table manipulator for Linux”.

Good for copying partition tables when replacing a failed hard disk in a (md Linux Software Raid) RAID. For example, to copy the partition table from sdb to sda:

sfdisk –d /dev/sdb | sed –e s/sdb/sda/ |  sfdisk /dev/sda

Of course you’d also be doing the usual **mdadm –fail, –remove, physically swap disk, –add, cat /proc/mdstat, –detail, **and installing grub on the new hard drive:

grub> device (hd0)  /dev/sdb
grub> root (hd0,0)
grub> setup (hd0)
grub> quit

(Unmercifully plagiarised from Rodrigo’s notes).