Creating additional volumes on Readynas

When I fired up my Readynas nv+ v2, I didnt have a copy of the RAIDar admin tool running, so it defaulted to creating an xraid2 volume.  This was fine, apart from after the 2x 1TB disks were initialised, I couldnt add the 2 500GB disks from my old box.  This is my account of how I (hopefully) create a 2nd volume

I already had root ssh access enabled, so with a quick scout around the file system, I could see that lvm and md were used in creating some of the raid arrays.

Identify which disk is which.

So to see what was on each disk, I used fdisk -l

fdisk -l /dev/sda

WARNING: GPT (GUID Partition Table) detected on '/dev/sda'! The util fdisk doesn't support GPT. Use GNU Parted.


Disk /dev/sda: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
256 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121126 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16128 * 512 = 8257536 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1              1      121127   976762583+  ee  GPT

So this shows that on the first sata disk, there is a 1000 GB disk, sdb was also the same, with sdc and sdd both showing as 500 GB disks

Preparing Array

Now that I knew which disks I wanted to meddle with, I could start to prepare the array.  I found some instructions on www.cyberciti.biz which I approximately followed.

1. using fdisk, delete (d) existing partion
2. then create a new partition (n)  I chose primary and first as the partition options
3. change the type (t) to fd, indicating software raid (this may not be the partition type I need, as the existing partions appear to be 0xee, which is GPT)
4. write changes (w)
5. Repeat on other disk
6. using mdadm, create the array. The c volume looks to be using /dev/md2, so I'm using /dev/md3:
   

   mdadm --create /dev/md3 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 

7. Format the new array ( I chose ext3 initially):
   

   mkfs.ext3 /dev/md3

8. Mount the new partition:
   

   ln -s /dev/md3 /dev/d
   mkdir /d
   mount /dev/d /d

9. Add disk to fstab, so it gets mounted at each boot

Work in Progress

I'm yet to reboot and test that the disk is found at next boot, but it is usable.  The nas admin website doesnt allow me to share it and make use of it that way yet.  But looking at what else is going on, it appears that the /c volume uses lvm, so I may try creating an lvm partition on the md partition, and see how the nas copes