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Re: [sheflug] HD partitioning question
----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter Humphrey" <prh [at] gotadsl.co.uk>
To: "sheflug" <sheflug [at] sheflug.co.uk>
Sent: Tuesday, August 01, 2006 5:37 PM
Subject: 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
Apologies for the late reply here. Things are not going well. Despite giving
it a go, and getting some partitions created, its screwing up at various
points during the bootstrap and compilation phases, and setting up grub is
proving a headache too.
Not only that, but the Gentoo forums are also littered with various posts
about setting up system locales; people seem to be running into trouble big
time, on stuff that used to 'just work'. So thats 2 problem areas now with
Gentoo; locales and the nvidia/xserver issue.
I so want to stick with Gentoo, but its getting harder and harder to justify
it.
Peter, thanks for your reply; Ive printed this info out for future
reference, and will be returning to it hopefully.
For the Gentoo users amongst us, Im referring to the /etc/locales.gen,
/etc/env.d/02locale, and the recent interest that the folks at Gentoo are
pushing for people to use UTF-8. I must have found half a dozen different
guides, all with different info in them. This, together with the move to
modular X is making a clean installation extremely difficult.
Do we have any Gentoo guru's here ? I sure could do with the help!
Steve.
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