One of the RAID1 arrays was failing in my IDE bandelero because of a bad hard disk. Worse because of kernel panics the reiserfs was corrupt and causing further kernel panics. It took me a long time pussy footing around the filesystem to get a good backup. I basically ran strace against rsync and waited for it to kernel panic reading the reiserfs filesystem. Then I gathered any lstat64 failures, rebooted and excluded those files from the backup. After about 20 kernel panic reboots and lstat64 results, I got a full backup. I'm switching back to ext3. Reiser did fine until the hardware failed. I was using reiser 3.6. I'm sure it's more stable now, but once burned twice shy.
Thankfully no critical files were included in the corruption. My old writeups call this an mp3 share, but it has grown more important than that in my adult life. It has tax returns, quickbooks files, laptop backups, appliance serial numbers and a lot of other important data. I even keep an offsite backup a few times a year.
After all that was done, I could move on to building a new array. Best buy had 200GB disks for $79 each. That's 40 cents per GB or 80 cents per RAID1 GB. That's a nice change from last time where it was $480 for 240GB which is $2 per GB or $4 per RAID1 GB. I'm still using the same promise chip (PDC20269) based Maxtor PCI card. What follows are the details of building a new 400GB logical volume from 2 RAID1 arrays with some helpful commands tacked on the end.