UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have 2 drives on a sun solaris 8 server that is a live server. I am putting in an additional 2 drives and want to mirror the the first 2. I was thinking of using disksuite but one drive is the root drive with 1 maybe 2 free paritions. The other is only one partition (36G). I was wondering how I could use disk suite to mirror them. I have never used it so I don't want to take chances. My only experience with mirroring is raidctl, but my controller only allows one mirror.

1) Is there an easier way? This will be a remote server so I need something that has automatic failover.

2) If I use raidctl for the drive without free partitions, does that automatically failover if the master fails?

Thanks

Are you using disksuite currently? If you are, I think you can add a disk and make mirrors of existing volumes on that disk.
AFAIK, if you aren't (you are using /dev/dsk/cXtXdXsX), then you will need a downtime to move the / to disksuite.

Hi there.

I ended up installing Disksuite and mirroring the drives and it went very smoothly (mirrored drive 0 to drive 2).

Since I have no free partitions on drive 1 and was considering using raidctl but I was wondering how automatic failover works with that? Disksuite modified vfstab, but if the live drive fails with raidctl, how does the second drive take over?

Thanks