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On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 11:01 AM, Neil Bothwick <neil@××××××××××.uk> wrote: |
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> On Sun, 18 Apr 2010 08:13:08 -0700, Mark Knecht wrote: |
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> |
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>> I'm not sure that we good advice or not for RAIDs that could be |
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>> assembled later but that's what I did and it leads to the kernel |
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>> trying to do everything before the system is totally up and mdadm is |
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>> really running. |
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> |
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> I only have one RAID1 of 400MB for / and one RAID5 carrying an LVM volume |
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> group for everything else. Using multiple RAID partitions without LVM is |
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> far to complicated for my brain to handle. |
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> |
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> |
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> -- |
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> Neil Bothwick |
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Nahh...I don't believe that for a moment, but this is a rather more |
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complicated task than a basic desktop PC. This is about number |
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crunching using multiple instances of Windows running under VMWare. |
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|
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First, the basic system: |
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|
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/dev/md3 - 50GB 3-drive RAID1 => The ~amd64 install we discussed over |
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the last week. This is the whole Gentoo install. |
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/dev/md5 - 50GB 3-drive RAID1 => A standard stable install - same as |
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md3 but stable, and again the whole Gentoo install. |
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Obviously I don't use the two above at the same time. I'm mostly on |
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stable and testing out ~amd64 right now. I use one or the other. |
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/dev/md11 => 100GB RAID0 - This partition is the main data storage for |
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the 5 Windows VMs I want to run at the same time. I went RAID0 because |
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my Windows apps appear to need an aggregate disk bandwidth of about |
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150-200MB/Sec and I couldn't get that with RAID1. I'll see how well |
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this works out over time. |
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/dev/md6 => 250GB RAID1 used purely as backup for the RAID0 which is |
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backed up daily, although right now not automatically. |
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The RAID0 and backup RAID1 need to be available whether I'm booting |
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stable (md5) or ~amd64. (md3) |
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I found some BIOS options, one of which was as default set to 'Fast |
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Boot'. I disabled that, slowing down boot and hopefully allowing far |
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more time to get the drives online more reliably. So far I've powered |
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off and rebooted 5 or 6 times. Each time the system has come up clean. |
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That's a first. |
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I could maybe post a photo of what I'm seeing at boot but essentially |
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the boot process complains with red exclamation marks about md6 & md11 |
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but in dmesg the only thing I find is the one-liner |
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|
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md: created md3 |
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md: bind<sda3> |
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md: bind<sdc3> |
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md: bind<sdb3> |
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md: running: <sdb3><sdc3><sda3> |
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raid1: raid set md3 active with 3 out of 3 mirrors |
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md3: detected capacity change from 0 to 53694562304 |
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md: ... autorun DONE. |
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md5: unknown partition table |
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and after that no other messages. |
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BTW - I did sort of take a gamble and change the partitions for md6 |
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and md11 to type 83 instead of 0xfd. It doesn't appear to have caused |
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any problems and I have only the above 'unknown partition table' |
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message. Strange as md5 is mounted and the system seems completely |
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happy: |
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|
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mark@c2stable ~ $ df |
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Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on |
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/dev/md5 51612920 7552836 41438284 16% / |
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udev 10240 296 9944 3% /dev |
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/dev/md11 103224600 17422220 80558784 18% /virdata |
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/dev/md6 243534244 24664820 206498580 11% /backups |
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shm 6151580 0 6151580 0% /dev/shm |
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mark@c2stable ~ $ |
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Cheers, |
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Mark |
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