SATA hotplug + mdadm raid
Hi,
I recently upgraded my home server to an HP ml30 tower server. It came
with a 4 drive hotplug SATA cage. I loaded two old unused drives in it
and installed Debian Stretch on it putting the drives in a software
raid1 via the debian installer. My plan was once I got the new box up
and running that I would shut off the old machine and use the drives
from that, swapping them out one at a time and letting mdadm resync.
Before putting the new box into "production", I pulled the 2nd drive
(sdb) to see what would happen (with the machine still running). Of
course mdadm went into degraded mode with a one disk raid1. I slid the
same drive back in and it came back as /dev/sdb. Later on, after a few
reboots, I pulled the 2nd drive and swapped it with a drive from the old
machine (it was also still up and running with mdadm raid1). However
this time the new drive didn't come up as sdb, but as /dev/sdc. I set up
the partitions the same as sda but I didn't join it to the mdadm array
yet. I wasn't sure if joining as "sdc" and then on reboot having it come
up possibly as "sdb" would mess up anything so I just rebooted. On
reboot it came up as "sdb" and I joined it to the array and all was well.
But I still need to swap the first drive (sda) and I don't really want
to have to reboot this time. So what can I do to ensure that once I pull
the old drive and put in the new one that it comes back up as "sda"? Or
does that even matter? (seems like it would..)
Regards,
Samuel Smith
Reply to: