Hi all, Gary Sardine has been most helpful with the RAID issue. When I replied to him after his first post, I forgot to say reply all and the subsequent conversation has been between him and me. I thought I would post the information he has shared for everyone's benefit. I may not get to attempting to set it up for a couple of weeks. Here are his helpful notes: >On Sun, 2002-12-15 at 05:46, David Tisdell wrote: > Thanks Gary.
No problem. > Two points of clarification: > 1) I would go ahead and install and create mount > points etc on a single drive (or multiple drives if I > wanted /home on a separate drive) and then add raid > support after the fact yes? Since you are interested in RAID1, this might work, but I have never tried it. I do want to mention before I forget that you really should try to have each drive on its own IDE channel for software RAID. With RAID1 it's not as big a deal as with R0 or R5, though. I expect it might work to install in a single drive, duplicate the partition scheme in a second (mirror) drive, then create /etc/raidtab and use mkraid to make the RAID1 devices. I don't know. What I do with Debian is kind of cheating (becaused I work at a GNU/Linux PC shop, and we have lots of hardware at our disposal), but it might give you ideas. We have an IDE drive that holds a good Debian installation. It boots a kernel that will drive any piece of hardware we offer. We boot a new system (getting Debian) off of this hard drive, hanging the hard drive off of a Promise PCI IDE card, so it is out of the way of the real system drives. We then partition and format the real system drives. In the case of a system entirely on RAID1: o make partition schemes for each of two hard drives identical (software RAID mirrors partitions, not drives) o create entries in /etc/raidtab (using an example copy we keep around for reference, changing only things like raid-level and device) o use mkraid to make the /dev/mdN software RAID devices. o formate the software RAID devices /dev/mdN: + use mkreiserfs /dev/mdN for ReiserFS. + use mke2fs /dev/mdN for ext2 + use mke2fs -j /dev/mdN for ext3 + use mkfs.xfs /dev/mdN for SGI's XFS file system. o Mount the new system inside of /mnt. e.g., If / is RAID1 using /dev/md0 and /home is separate, RAID1 using /dev/md1, do: # mount /dev/md0 /mnt # mkdir /mnt/home # mount /dev/hd1 /mnt/home The purpose is to _copy_ the running file system (off of our stock Debian drive) into the new devices. We drop to run level 1 and use cp with certain flags to do this properly. Next, we create directories in /mnt that we will not cp: # cd /mnt ; mkdir cdrom floppy proc mnt o Finally, be sure to be in run level 1 (we do all of the above in run level 1), and do: # cd / ; cp -a dir1 dir2 ... mnt dir1 dir2 ... ranges over every top level directory (e.g. usr home lib ...) except for cdrom floppy proc and mnt, which we do _not_ want to cp). If I did not have a stock Debian hard drive and a PCI IDE card available for this, I would switch to a shell early in a Debian installation and create software RAID devices by hand, format them (mke2fs -j or whatever), and mount them. Don't forget, you will need software RAID support available in the kernel. If you will be booting off of a RAID1 array, it's easiest to compile RAID1 support in rather than using a module (else you'll need to use initrd, which Red Hat sets up behind the scenes, and Debian does not). My Debian PPC system has mac-fdisk and not pfdisk; mac-fdisk is a lot like fdisk for i386. Regards, Gary. __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
