[plug] Root/Boot on Software RAID

[James Bromberger]

On Mon, Sep 17, 2001 at 12:41:19PM +0800, Grahame Bowland wrote:
> On 17 Sep 2001 11:53:23 +0800, AWoodley at IINet.net.au wrote:
> > To this end I intend to set up a RAID 1 for /, /usr, /home and RAID 0 for
> > /var. However, I'm having difficulty getting the thing to boot using the
> > RAID device as /. I've followed the steps outlined in the Software RAID
> > 
> > I'm using Debian Woody with the 2.4 kernel, the hard-drives are the same
> > specs and set up as the masters on ide0 and ide1 buses.


I wrote a HOWTO on this kust two weeks ago. Check the PLUG archives! 
The URL for the HOW TO is:

	http://www.james.rcpt.to/programs/debian/raid1/

> Several of our servers at UCS use RAID-1 as the root device. The easiest
> way to solve problems like this is to lower the number of things that
> could be going wrong:
>  - recompile your kernel with raid1 and ext2 compiled in, 
>    not as modules in case this is the problem. You're going to want
>    these in the kernel anyway, so there's no special reason to have 
>    them as modules


Yuk!  Its nice to have easily upgradable software.  The trick is using 
the initrd and making sure it has raid1 and md support, and knows 
what to use as its root parition. Check the HOWTO.

>  - make sure you changed the partition type of all RAID 
>    partitions to fd (Linux RAID autodetect)

Yes yes yes. 

> Lilo in debian definitely knows about RAID; as far as I know all recent
> lilo releases do. Nothing has to be done to lilo to make it work on
> Potato, so I'm guessing Woody will be fine.

The only bit that Lilo 'knows' about raid is that when it writes a boot 
block, it should write to all drives that make up the raid1 set.

  James

-- 
 James Bromberger <james_AT_rcpt.to> www.james.rcpt.to

 Remainder moved to http://www.james.rcpt.to/james/sig.html
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 232 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.plug.org.au/pipermail/plug/attachments/20010917/7396a37f/attachment.pgp>