I'm setting up a potato system to boot off a software RAID, using a 2.2.19 kernel and raidtools2. The kernel was built with
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_MD=y CONFIG_MD_MIRRORING=y CONFIG_MD_RAID5=y which should be the appropriate settings. It's currently installed on a single disk and I'm trying to use the trick mentioned in the software-RAID-howto of listing the active disk as a failed drive when creating the array, then copying my data onto the (degraded) md device, then using raidhotadd to bring the array up to full redundancy. I've done this before without incident, but today, it just doesn't seem to like me... --- cut here --- # cat /etc/raidtab raiddev /dev/md0 raid-level 1 nr-raid-disks 2 nr-spare-disks 0 persistent-superblock 1 chunk-size 4 device /dev/hdg1 raid-disk 0 device /dev/hde1 failed-disk 1 # mkraid /dev/md0 handling MD device /dev/md0 analyzing super-block disk 0: /dev/hdg1, 1999840kB, raid superblock at 1999744kB disk 1: /dev/hde1, failed mkraid: aborted, see the syslog and /proc/mdstat for potential clues. # cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [3 raid1] [4 raid5] read_ahead not set md0 : inactive md1 : inactive md2 : inactive md3 : inactive --- cut here --- Nothing is sent to syslog when mkraid is run, so no "potential clues" exist. Another interesting note is that, although hde and hdg claim to be identical drives in their labeling, cfdisk says that hde reports itself as having 255 heads/4865 cylinders and hdg reports 16 heads/77536 cylinders. I've made sure that all partitions on hdg are slightly smaller than their corresponding partitions on hde, though, so the difference in reported geometry doesn't seem like it should cause any problems. The partitions on hdg are of type 0xfd ("Linux raid autodetect") and those on hde are 0x83 ("Linux ext2") for now, but I intend to change them to 0xfd before adding them to the array. That pretty well covers everything... Have I missed any details or made any obvious mistakes? -- When we reduce our own liberties to stop terrorism, the terrorists have already won. - reverius Innocence is no protection when governments go bad. - Tom Swiss