Can this RAID mirror be fixed?

[Martin Maney <maney@pobox.com>]

It's not really urgent because I'm almost certainly going to need to change
it all around for an unrelated reason, but it's still a good question.

Given: the 0.90 version raidtools and a 2.4.18-pre9 kernel with raid1
compiled in.  A working system installed on /dev/hda in a couple partitions,
and a pair of nice new drives going to become a mirror pair.  Due to
physical limitations as well as a desire to test the approach, I setup the
RAID pair with the second disk marked as failed, to be added a little later.

Okay, the basic setup works fine.  At the point where I was debating whether
to pull the old drive (hda) and install the second new drive and let the
reconstruction commence, or to go to bed and do it tomorrow, I realized I
had a bit of a problem.  The new drives are going on the second IDE chipset
(third and fourth channels, or hde,f,g,h).  Not having used these very
often, I made a little error in setting up the raditab that was used to
initialize the RAID half-pair.  The second drive, which is intended to be
the master on the second channel, or hdg, got entered as hdf.

So I'm heading towards bed now, leaving you with my question: is it really
necessary to rebuild the RAID set de novo to fix this, or is there a way
around it?  The docs kind of suggest, in discussing a different sort of
disaster recovery scenario, that maybe I could change the drive and
re-mkraid the single current drive without losing data, but will that work?

I suppose I'll give it a try in the morning unless I get a better
suggestion.  Luckily, it can't make things any worse if it doesn't work.

Thanks!

-- 
There is overwhelming evidence that the higher the level of self-esteem,
the more likely one will be to treat others with respect, kindness, and
generosity. -- Nathaniel Branden
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