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Re: [sheflug] HD partitioning question
On Monday 31 July 2006 23:40, Wonkey Donkey wrote:
> You don't mention Peter, which board and chipset you set it up on, and
> your drive configuration, but I'd definitely be interested in hearing how
> you got it all to work.
This box was built by Armari in late 2003; it uses an MSI K8T Master2 FAR
motherboard, which has a VIA K8T800 chipset. The SATA RAID circuit is a
VT8237R. The two CPUs are Opteron 246 and it has 4 x 1GB PC2700 DDR ECC
registered SDRAM. The box came with 2 x WD Caviar 80GB IDE disks, which
gave good service until I decided a few months ago that the time had come
to fit the SATA disks I should have bought in the first place (they were
too expensive then, and untried).
The original OS was XP Pro, but I had various flavours of Linux on it with
much multi-booting. In my naivete I wanted to use the alleged RAIDability
on the motherboard, but I found eventually that I couldn't, or shouldn't -
the wisdom seemed to be that DM RAID was not safe to use, and that I should
use the trusted MD RAID software in Linux. So no Windows RAID on the SATA
disks, then.
Installing Gentoo on software RAID was ... interesting. I doubt I could have
done it (and remained sane) without the floppy disk on which I assembled a
small script to pair the partitions I'd created on sda and sdb into MD
RAID0 partitions. I had to rerun that script every time I booted from the
installation CD, because the necessary devices are absent. This is the
script:
--
$ cat /mnt/fd/setupraid
mknod /dev/md0 b 9 0
mknod /dev/md1 b 9 1
mknod /dev/md2 b 9 2
mknod /dev/md3 b 9 3
mknod /dev/md4 b 9 4
mknod /dev/md5 b 9 5
mknod /dev/md6 b 9 6
mknod /dev/md7 b 9 7
mknod /dev/md8 b 9 8
modprobe raid0
mdadm -A /dev/md0 /dev/sda5 /dev/sdb5
mdadm -A /dev/md1 /dev/sda6 /dev/sdb6
mdadm -A /dev/md2 /dev/sda7 /dev/sdb7
mdadm -A /dev/md3 /dev/sda8 /dev/sdb8
mdadm -A /dev/md4 /dev/sda9 /dev/sdb9
mdadm -A /dev/md5 /dev/sda10 /dev/sdb10
mdadm -A /dev/md6 /dev/sda11 /dev/sdb11
mdadm -A /dev/md7 /dev/sda12 /dev/sdb12
mdadm -A /dev/md8 /dev/sda13 /dev/sdb13
--
--
$ grep md /etc/fstab
/dev/md2 / reiserfs noatime,notail,user_xattr 1 1
/dev/md3 /home reiserfs noatime,user_xattr 1 2
/dev/md4 /home/prh/common reiserfs noatime,user_xattr 1 3
/dev/md5 /usr/local reiserfs noatime,user_xattr 1 2
/dev/md6 /tmp reiserfs noatime,user_xattr 1 2
/dev/md7 /srv reiserfs noatime,user_xattr 1 2
/dev/md0 /mnt/suse ext3 noatime,noauto,user 0 0
/dev/md1 /mnt/suse/home ext3 noatime,noauto,user 0 0
--
After creating the partitions, installation was straightforward and the
system booted happily - provided that I disabled the primary IDE channel in
the BIOS; that's the one with the original disks. I couldn't find any way
for GRUB to boot from the SATA disks if the IDEs were visible at the same
time. Still can't; so if I ever want to run raw Win XP [1] I have to reboot
three times to enable the IDE and change the boot order in the BIOS, and
finally start Windows; then reverse the procedure to get back to Linux. I
don't like all that burning of data into the EEPROM: it makes me nervous.
> Its a shame we dont have any locally produced articles on stuff like this
> that we can refer to. Maybe from members who currently own the hardware
> in question, and are willing to produce such material. It would be a
> great resource.
I agree. Often though the problem is one of understanding, and nowadays I
don't find that getting any easier!
[1] I don't often have to do this since I installed VMware Server and used
it to install Windows into a virtual machine under /srv - which is now
accessible over the network so I don't have to run Windows in my laptop
either. Bonus! (Little things please little minds: I still giggle at a
screen saver running contentedly in a window while I move it around the
real screen.) On the other hand, the IDE disks are invisible but powered
on; this must be another of those temporary arrangements that freeze
themselves into permanence.
--
Rgds
Peter
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