How do you enable RAID in the Jaunty Live CD (in order to change partitions)?

Question

I need to increase the size of my Karmic Koala partition, but I believe I can't do that from within the system itself. The CD I have is from Jaunty, which does not support RAID out of the box. How do I install/enable RAID HDD detection in the Jaunty live CD in order that I may change the system's partition size? (or is there an easier way to go about this?)

Answer 1

First you must install needed packages for raid support: sudo apt-get install dm-raid mdadm

Then you enable kernel module for raid by issuing sudo modprobe dm-raid4-5. This should also load dm-mod.

After that you can verify whether the raid device is automatically found by issuing ls /dev/md*. (Or replacing md with anything your raid device is named - can be found with fgrep ARRAY /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf, unless your /etc is stored on that raid...) If the listing shows no devices, they can be scanned automatically via sudo mdadm --assemble --scan.

And, as a final step, mount the filesystem(s): sudo mount /dev/md0 /mnt or similar.

(Note, that these instructions are based on experiences with 8.10 so some steps might be unnecessary on 9.04.)

Answer 2

You can use any Linux live CD to mess with your RAID and/or partitions, provided it supports it.

Personally I use Finnix which is nice and small, but command line only (good enough for me). If you want a graphical one, try something like Knoppix.