On Thu, Jan 20, 2000 at 01:08:48PM -0600, Jake Johnson wrote:
>> Not all true my friend. I installed redhat 6.1 and have two scsi disks.
>> /boot is raid 1 and / is raid 0. Everything works great but I recompiled
>> my kernel and now I am out of luck. How did Redhat do it? I am here
>> because I want the question answered?
Steve Borho <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> replied:
>raid1 is mirroring, right? So to your BIOS, it looks just like a normal
>SCSI drive.
Ah-HA! I think you've given my exhausted brain a swift kick! Thanks! I
needed that. ;-)
More important than the BIOS seeing the disk as a normal SCSI drive is LILO
seeing the disk as a normal drive. I think in part that's how & why it
works. Don't know if it would work for RAID5 or not.
At any rate, I'm finally in the same location as my test server and here's
what I've discovered so far:
The server:
300MHz PII w/ 2 IDE disk drives, so I'm obviously leaving the SCSI part out.
Test #1, stock 6.1 kernel, commenting the initrd line out - boot fails.
Obviously being able to boot from a raid partition requires the initrd
image, at least in the stock kernel.
Test #2, custom kernel, raid1 compiled into the kernel, initrd image made
and used - boot succeeds, but I got a warning message while making the
initrd image that it couldn't find the raid1 driver. (Makes sense since I
compiled it in.)
Test #3, custom kernel as above, init line commented out - boot succeeds,
no error messages.
After taking another look at the man pages for mkinitrd it now has switches
to leave out the SCSI drivers and/or the RAID drivers. The upshot of all
this is pretty close to what I had guessed:
Option #1, leave the raid drivers as modules and make an initrd image.
Option #2, compile the raid drivers into the kernel and no initrd image is
necessary, unless you need it for other things like SCSI card drivers, in
which case you'll need to make one with the --omit-raid-modules switch.
So Jake, I think you have several options:
- Leave the SCSI & RAID drivers as modules, in which case you'll need an
initrd image.
- Compile the SCSI drivers in, leave the RAID driver modular, in which case
you'll need an initrd image without the SCSI drivers
- Leave the SCSI driver modular, compile the RAID drivers in, then you'll
need an initrd image without the RAID drivers.
- Compile both SCSI & RAID drivers in and you won't need an initrd image at
all.
I'm not sure which is the best. I have a server that's full SCSI and I've
compiled the SCSI drivers in so I don't need an initrd image. (It doesn't
have RAID yet so that's not an issue.) Since the SCSI cards are embedded I
figure I might as well compile in the drivers and save myself the trouble
of making an initrd image. (Plus I *sometimes* forget about the initrd
image - oops!)
Guess it's up to you which way to go unless someone has reasons why one is
better than another. Give it a try and let us know if you're successful.
HTH
-Eric
Eric Sisler
Library Computer Technician
Westminster Public Library
Westminster, CO, USA
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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