Hiyas All,
Have been trying for the past few day to setup RAID-1 on a
redhat linux system and came across some weirdnesses..
firstly, this is the system its running on..
RedHat Linux 5.2
raidtools 0.90 (the rpm from the redhat contrib site - originally started
out with the 0.5 version that came with the distribution)
Two SCSI hard drives, 4Gb each (these are identical drives)
the hardware is a compaq proliant 800 system (NCR 53c8xx SCSI Bus)
originally, i followed all the docs, and suceeded in mirroring the two
drives, but the problems started when i went to format the partition
(/dev/md0) with mke2fs, i got an error along the lines of "the file system
returned an unsupported library function call" or something, i no longer
can duplicate this message to give the exact wording because in my efforts
to fix it it got worse (heh, usually the case when you dont really know
what yer doing)
I then thought "ah-ha ! mabee i need to update the mke2fs program" so i
downloaded the rpm for e2fsprogs 1.14 and updated it - still the same
problem, i then decided that mabee it had something to do with the
raidtools package, and so went and updated that rpm to the one on the
contrib site as well (raidtools-0.90-19990309) this produced even more
confusion due to the fact that many of the nifty little toys i had been
playing with (ckraid or something) seemed to dissapear, and it STILL didnt
fix the problems.. so, i downloaded the sources and compiled my own copy of
the raidtools package, this gained me the readme docs which talked about
the changeover from the md* commands to the raidstart/stop/other stuff
commands - yet it STILL didnt work.. "blow it" I thought, and wiped both
drives clean and prepared to start again, only.. this time, i made one big
partition and went from there, after rebooting to clear everything out, i
went back and used the default raid-1 sample config and changed the spare
drive number to 0 (I didnt have any spare drives) and ended up with the
following /etc/raidtab file..
raiddev /dev/md0
raid-level 1
nr-raid-disks 2
nr-spare-disks 0
chunk-size 4
persistent-superblock 1
device /dev/sdb1
raid-disk 0
device /dev/sdc1
raid-disk 1
this seemed all well and good, and i fdisked the drive, insmoded the
raid1.o module and prepared to re-mirror my drives..
it then returned the following error and i cant seem to make any headway
after this..
[root@xxxxxx raidtools-0.90]# mkraid --force /dev/md0
DESTROYING the contents of /dev/md0 in 5 seconds, Ctrl-C if unsure!
handling MD device /dev/md0
analyzing super-block
disk 0: /dev/sdb1, 4188937kB, raid superblock at 4188864kB
disk 1: /dev/sdc1, 4188937kB, raid superblock at 4188864kB
mkraid: aborted
if i dont include the --force it just gives me the "aborted" message
I am really stuck here and have tried all day to find some documentation on
the web reguarding this and the mke2fs problem - any help would be mightily
appreciated..
thanks in advance
Steve.
PS : I know i cant spell.. and i really dont mind re-compiling anything if
redhat in their infinite wisdom "accidently" left something out of their
rpms :)
on another note also - this mke2fs problem was also bugging another guy i
met that was trying to do the same thing on another redhat system, is this
a common problem ?
