On Sun, 16 Jun 2024 11:57:13 -0400 Nick Holland wrote: > On 6/15/24 09:05, Marco van Hulten wrote: > > Hello, > > > > I got a new amd64 system with 3 NVMe disks of each 2 TB, with the > > idea to put them in RAID-5. I did not realise until now that one > > cannot boot from RAID-5. > > > > Would a good approach be to create a root device on one disk (and > > maybe altroots on one or both of the others) and use the rest of > > all disks as RAID-5 device? Or is there a good reason to boot from > > a disk separate from the envisioned RAID-5 configuration? > > I just set something up like this, myself. Four 4T disks. I wanted > redundancy but also recoverability. > > My solution: > [...]
Thank you, Nick. This is a big help. Using RAID-1 for this, as also suggested by Kirill and an off-list poster, seemed like a good idea, and no need for an altroot. Before I read your message, I did an installation with a small (1.5 G) RAID-1 installation with only root. Besides the missed benefit of having a full base system on each drive, it also had problems with installboot(8) at the end of the installation. It could not find /usr/mdec/biosboot, which I guess could have been because I had /usr on a different device (the RAID-5 device). Then I redone it with a 60 GB RAID-1 device, including /, swap, /usr, /usr/X11R6, /tmp and /var. The other partitions went to the large RAID-5 device. This worked! I only have to test if removing drives works, and if I have no access to RAID-5 I can still boot the system to the point I can login and run base-system commands. Marco
