Converting 2 mirrored NTFS drives to ext

[foxcar]

Hi all,

I have 2 drives mirrored via windows software raid and I plan to toss the drives into an Ubuntu server soon where they will also be mirrored. The server will have another drive for booting. What is the best way to get these mirrored drives into ext format while preserving my data? I plan to use software raid in Ubuntu as well. My only idea is to format a 3rd drive as ext and copy all the files over, seems inefficient though.

[Rubberman]

I am not aware of any way to take mirrored NTFS drives and switch them to ext2/3/4 mirrored drives automatically. For an operation like this you really need to backup your data to another device/drive. I could specify some steps to avoid that, but since I haven't tried them before I won't go there. I will, however, tell you what to do, assuming you will do a complete backup first.

1. unmirror the NTFS drives
2. mount one NTFS drive on Linux - you'll need the ntfs-3g driver to do that
3. backup data to additional drive
4. using the Linux disc management tools create a mirrored RAID volume using the two NTFS drives
5. create a new partition table and partition the mirrored drive using the Linux raid tools
6. format the partition with ext3/4, again using the Linux raid tools. This steps will create a raid device such as /dev/md127 or something like that
7. mount that device
8. copy the data over from the backup drive
9. you are done...
10. keep backup data around for awhile just in case something happens to the RAID.