Dirk-Jan's log

Fresh HDD space arrived

Dirk-Jan -

Two years have past since I installed two 2TB disks on my home server. Last week I squeezed out the remaining bytes of my data volume, so I ordered two brand new 3TB Western Digital harddisks (WD30EZRX) to replace the current 2TB ones. Two things prevented an upgrade as easy as the previous one. First I wanted to do a clean install of Debian 7.1 “Wheezy” and secondly wanted to switch to UEFI boot and GPT, so I had to create a new partition table and a new EFI boot partition.

System specification (before upgrade):

  • Intel DQ67EPB3 board
  • Debian 6.0.7 “Squeeze”
  • 2x WD20EARS (in software RAID1 and LVM2)

I have described the way I accomplished this task (in not so great detail):

  1. Shutdown the system
  2. Remove both disks
  3. Install both new disks
  4. Startup the system and enter the BIOS setup to enable ‘EFI boot’
  5. Boot the Debian installer from USB (debian-7.1.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso)
  6. Choose Advanced options → Expert install
  7. Choose Manual partitioning
  8. Configure both drives to use GPT as the partition table
  9. Be sure to create a EFI partition on both disks as the first partition
  10. Create RAID (MD) devices
  11. Create LVM devices
  12. Finish the installation
  13. Shutdown and attach one of the old drives
  14. Issue ‘mdadm –examine –scan’ to make sure the old md devices are listed
  15. Issue ‘mdadm -A /dev/md3 /dev/sdc4’ to assemble to old md devices
  16. Issue ‘mdadm –assemble –run /dev/md3’ to mark it active
  17. Issue ‘vgchange -a y’ to mark the LV available
  18. Mount the volume ‘mount –read-only /dev/data/data /mnt/oldinstall’
  19. Copy the contents of the old disk to the new volume
  20. Shutdown to remove the old disk
  21. Startup and you’re done

Hope another two years will pass before I need to go through the process again.