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