The problem:
You have made a big raid array (terabyte range) that also uses the Logical Volume Manager (LVM) format in your Linux distro of choice. It’s sitting in a computer that you would also like the option of running a flavour of windows on, at times. You realise that you cannot access the raid array that you made for Linux, when the machine is running the windows system.
The hacky as hell solution:
The basic idea: Virtualbox a Linux distro under windows, use it to access the raid array, share it via samba.
http://www.ubuntugeek.com/howto-access-ext3-partition-from-windows.html
Throw in some Raid 5 setup and access:
http://changelog.bthomson.com/2009/09/software-raid-5-in-windows-7.html#comment-form
Wait, what about LVM?:
http://www.thushanfernando.com/index.php/2009/09/02/mounting-and-activating-lvm-volumes-from-bootcd-to-recover-data-in-linux/
Caveats:
- I chose to mount the array as read only. Paranoia mostly. Read write should be fine, but I am only using this as a view only media share.read only works for me.
Make sure to cleanly close/ unmount your vms every time.even though you are mounting read only, this is still raid we are talking about. Take care with it.