Re: [gentoo-amd64] Upgrading to Raid

[Florian D.]

because there are so many people praising software-raid, you´ll probably 
find this story interesting, which happened to me yesterday (my system 
is -for the biggest part- on a raid5 partition):

while I emerged koffice, played some mp3´s and let matlab calculate sth. 
in the background, I tried to start a windows program with wine. I 
really shouldn´t do that, because Linux crashed and after a hard reboot 
it could not boot any more. It stopped during the execution of the 
init-scripts and i was not able to do anything, thus: 2nd hard reboot. I 
have another(old) gentoo installation on my computer and this time I 
booted into that one. By accident I realized that one of the discs of my 
raid system has been marked as faulty and it was syncing in the 
background. /proc/mdstat said that it would need 20min or so, but after 
15min it said 200min! After another 10min it was sth >300min (and a lot 
of IO errors). So I rebooted again, this time it synced successfully in 
12min. Then it was possible to boot and work with my normal system 
without any further difficulties or IO errors.

Summing up, I can say:

+ I successfully wrecked my file system, but software raid was able to 
repair it
- without a second Linux-installation on another partition, you´re lost
- restoring of a faulty raid disk is not reliable
- it seems that it is not possible to boot or work with a system, whose 
system disk is being restored at the same time (Linux-2.6.12.6)
-- 
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