Differences between version 11 and predecessor to the previous major change of SoftwareRaid.
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| Newer page: | version 11 | Last edited on Saturday, October 8, 2005 4:04:39 pm | by BnonnTennant | Revert |
| Older page: | version 9 | Last edited on Wednesday, July 13, 2005 1:36:47 pm | by DanielLawson | Revert |
@@ -7,9 +7,9 @@
Allthough I setup this machine up with Debian I am pretty sure that most of the steps listed below will be distribution independent. We will start from the basic hardware that doesn't do anything useful and progress until we have a machine that boots up into a full working Debian install off the raid array.
The machine that I used for this configuration has a Intel S845WD1-E Motherboard with two on-board [IDE] channels plus an extra two channels controlled by a Promise PDC20267 RAID chipset (commonly known as a Promise FastTrak100). Unfortunately Promise is not clever enough to release open source drivers for the RAID portion of this chipset so it is only useable as an IDE controller under linux. The rest of the machine is configured as follows. There is one 40GB Seagate IDE Disk on each of the FastTrak's channels. We want to use these two disks to create a RAID-1 array for redundant storage.
-Assuming that the physical installation has been completed correctly with a single disk on each IDE channel, 80pin IDE cables, etc. The next problem we face is that the Debian installer (an
all other distributions installers?) cannot install directly onto a raid array as the standard kernels do not have software raid support included. To get around this problem I used the first method described in [Software RAID HOWTO | http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO.html] of placing a 3rd disk on the first on-board IDE channel and installing a Basic Debian install on to that.
+Assuming that the physical installation has been completed correctly with a single disk on each IDE channel, 80pin IDE cables, etc. The next problem we face is that the Debian installer (and
all other distributions installers?) cannot install directly onto a raid array as the standard kernels do not have software raid support included. To get around this problem I used the first method described in [Software RAID HOWTO | http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO.html] of placing a 3rd disk on the first on-board IDE channel and installing a Basic Debian install on to that.
!Install Debian onto a different disk to the ones in your RAID array (On the first on-board IDE controller)
!Plain IDE support for the Promise PDC20267 is only stable in 2.4.21 so I downloaded the latest kernel and compiled it with the following options in the main kernel (NOT as options)
@@ -193,9 +193,17 @@
build a new initrd image upon installation. They should automatically notice if the
root device is /dev/md* and arrange for the appropriate modules to be present in the
initrd image and loaded appropriately. So if the software raid array is actually
your root filesystem when you do the kernel install, everything should just work.
+
+! Udev and Software RAID
+
+While trying to do software RAID on an Ubuntu machine, I ran into the problem of my /dev/md0 device spontaneously disappearing at the most inconvenient times (like when trying to boot the machine, for example). To fix this, I added the following line to /etc/udev/links.conf:
+
+ M md0 b 9 0
+
+And then restarted udev. This should apply for Debian Sarge too.
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CategoryOperatingSystem CategorySystemAdministration
See Also: RaidOnLinux
