Re: SATA RAID-1 redundant boot?

From: Les Mikesell (les_at_futuresource.com)
Date: 08/27/04

  • Next message: Mathieu Malaterre: "FPE in /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6" 
    To: For users of Fedora Core releases <fedora-list@redhat.com>
Date: Fri, 27 Aug 2004 15:39:56 -0500

    On Fri, 2004-08-27 at 14:53, Stewart Nelson wrote:

    > As a result, I was forced to use software RAID for all drives.
    >
    > 1. Could you please recommend a reliable and reasonably priced SATA
    > controller with hardware RAID-1 capability, BIOS boot code and a
    > compatible Linux driver? or,

    The 3ware cards do hardware raid and work well with Linux. They
    are a lot more expensive that the ones that make the driver
    do the work in software.

    > 3. Is there a way to set up two separate boot partitions, MBRs, etc.,
    > so that either can boot the system?

    If you set the raid partitions up during the install and make
    /boot a mirrored partition the installer should take care
    of setting up the MBR on both drives. (This is based on
    installing RH9 on scsi drives using lilo, so it could
    easily be wrong for fedora and/or grub). You also have
    to test to see if the system will boot at all if you have
    a failed primary drive. Most older IDE systems won't. The
    IBM Netfinity where I did the SCSI setup would move on
    to the 2nd drive and boot. I haven't tried anything with
    SATA controllers yet.

    I have seen the installer do some really stupid things
    when trying to create raid mirrors (like rearrange the
    partition layout, or try to pair things on the same
    drive). You can force the layout by using fdisk to
    make the partitions manually, then starting the install
    over and picking the partitions for each md set. If
    the partitions already exist, the installer won't try
    to rearrange them (again, not based on current FC2, this
    could be fixed now...).

    I'm sure there is a simple lilo/grub invocation to
    write the loader on the 2nd drive if you have a
    /boot partition there and keep it up to date. 

    ---
  Les Mikesell
   les@futuresource.com
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