Ubuntu Upgrade & Software RAID

You never know what you are going to get when you do a distribution upgrade.

Somewhere along the way I "upgraded" my little fileserver from Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Long Term Support) to 6.10 (NOT Long Term Support). Why? I do not know. Support for 6.06 LTS will end June 2011 but support for 6.10 ended April 2008!! Unfortunately, I only realized this yesterday. No wonder I hadn't seen any package updates for some time. :-(

Time to upgrade, NOW!

Ubuntu's latest is another LTS release, 8.04. So my big plan is go to somehow get from 6.10 to this latest LTS release. Supposedly you can do it if you upgrade a release at a time. Away we went using Method 2 here...

Changed my sources in /etc/apt/sources.list replacing all instances of edgy to feisty.

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

sudo apt-get -f install

sudo dpkg --configure -a

sudo telinit 6

It rebooted, so I thought I was probably safe.
sudo lsb_release -a showed me that I was indeed upgraded to 7.04. All was right with the world...

Not so.

My RAID5 & RAID1 devices were missing a drive! What happened?!

It turns out that upgrading turned two of my IDE drives into SCSI devices and left one as a regular IDE device. Bizarre. The missing RAID drives were the partitions from the one IDE device that was left. I used Webmin to simply add the appropriate partions from the IDE drive to the SCSI RAID devices and that was it. It worked without sending my data to /dev/null.

The RAID5 devices rebuilt and the RAID1 was back to mirroring with a spare. All was right with the world.

My question is, what's going to happen during my upgrade from 7.04 - 7.10 - 8.04? Will I be so lucky. I was pretty freaked out when my IDE drives "turned" into SCSI devices. Just weird, and why the heck did it leave one of the IDE drives as such instead of making it a SCSI device? I do not know...