I've been at this for a while, and I've run out of ideas. I have an elderly K62/400 PC, which had a hard disk in it with 8.2 on, which was running OK. I decided to turn it into a backup and music server, and took out the old 9Gb drive, replacing it with 2 80Gb drives. I set the BIOS so that these new drives were "not installed", as I understand Linux can deal with handling them itself, without the BIOS' help. I started by setting up both drives exactly the same, with the corresponding partitions on each drive set up as RAID partitions: /spare (15Mb) = hda1/hdd1 - md0 /swap (2Gb) = hda2/hdd2 - md1 / (10Gb) = hda5/hdd5 - md2 /backups (30Gb) = hda6/hdd6 - md3 /music (32Gb) = hda7/hdd7 - md4 (The /spare is because this layout was based on YaST's original suggestion, which included a /boot partition, but the Create RAID option said that /boot was not allowed to be used). The install went fine, until the initial reboot, when there was an error message: "Failed to boot from harddisk". To be fair, before doing hte partitioning, YaST had warned that tis would happen: "With your current setup, your installation may not be directly bootable, because you have no "boot" aprtition, and your "root" partition is RAID. LILO sometimes fails in this configuration. OK. Plan 2. A variant of the above: / (10Gb) = hda1/hdd1 - md0 /swap (2Gb) = hda2/hdd2 - md1 /backups (30Gb) = hda3/hdd3 - md2 /music (32Gb) = hda4/hdd4 - md3 Same result. Plan 3: Perhaps the root partition shouldn't be RAID: /dev/hda: / (10Gb) = hda1 /swap (2Gb) = hda2 /backups (30Gb) = hda3 - md0 /music (32Gb) = hda4 - md1 /dev/hdd: /twin1 (10Gb) = hdd1 /twin2 (2Gb) = hdd2 /backups (30Gb) = hdd3 - md0 /music (32Gb) = hdd4 - md1 GRUB is installed as the loader this time, but still the same result. Plan 4: Perhaps the BIOS needs a /boot partition: /dev/hda: /boot (24Mb) = hda1 / (10Gb) = hda2 /swap (2Gb) = hda3 /backups (30Gb) = hda5 - md0 /music (32Gb) = hda6 - md1 /dev/hdd: /twin1 (10Gb) = hdd1 /twin2 (10Gb) = hdd2 /twin3 (2Gb) = hdd3 /backups (30Gb) = hdd5 - md0 /music (32Gb) = hdd6 - md1 Still no go with GRUB. I then tried switching GRUB to LILO, but there seem to be no files in the /boot dir, so /sbin/lilo doesn't run. LILO is installed, though, so I'm not sure why the files (eg messge, vmlinuz) are not there. At this point I have reached the limit of my meagre knowledge, and I'm hoping somebody on the list can give me a clue as to what to do to get this working. Is it a BIOS issue, a drive one, a RAID one, or a bootloader one? TIA -- Best wishes Kevin Donnelly www.kyfieithu.co.uk - Meddalwedd Rydd yn Gymraeg
The 03.10.18 at 17:25, Kevin Donnelly wrote:
/spare (15Mb) = hda1/hdd1 - md0 /swap (2Gb) = hda2/hdd2 - md1
I read that swap does not need to be raid, because the kernel handles it on its own - you only need to do set the same priority for both. Also, perhaps you need /boot on not raid partitions, but that is just an idea. There is a very interesting howto you should read: The Software-RAID HOWTO It is on the distribution. There is chapter with your name on the 'must read' list ;-) 4.11. Booting on RAID -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson
On Saturday 18 October 2003 08:25, Kevin Donnelly wrote:
I've been at this for a while, and I've run out of ideas.
I have an elderly K62/400 PC, which had a hard disk in it with 8.2 on, which was running OK. I decided to turn it into a backup and music server, and took out the old 9Gb drive, replacing it with 2 80Gb drives. I set the BIOS so that these new drives were "not installed", as I understand Linux can deal with handling them itself, without the BIOS' help.
I started by setting up both drives exactly the same, with the corresponding partitions on each drive set up as RAID partitions: /spare (15Mb) = hda1/hdd1 - md0 /swap (2Gb) = hda2/hdd2 - md1 / (10Gb) = hda5/hdd5 - md2 /backups (30Gb) = hda6/hdd6 - md3 /music (32Gb) = hda7/hdd7 - md4 (The /spare is because this layout was based on YaST's original suggestion, which included a /boot partition, but the Create RAID option said that /boot was not allowed to be used).
The install went fine, until the initial reboot, when there was an error message: "Failed to boot from harddisk". To be fair, before doing hte partitioning, YaST had warned that tis would happen: "With your current setup, your installation may not be directly bootable, because you have no "boot" aprtition, and your "root" partition is RAID. LILO sometimes fails in this configuration.
I think you're makeing this WAY too hard by trying to micromanage the partitioning. First, LILO is dead, Long Live GRUB. Don't over-ride SuSE's suggestion to use GRUB. Next: Make a smallish /boot partition on hda, and a similar size partition on hdb. 16meg is all you need. Call the one on hdb /bootmirror and plan to write a cron job to copy from /boot to /bootmirror occasionally. Then: Create two half-size swaps, one on each drive. Yes you can have too swaps, and linux will use them better than one full size swap. If too much trouble, just create one swap and an equal size partition on the other drive (just to keep things balanced, for your own sanity). Then: Create two large partitions (remainder of each drive) to be used by raid. (I'm presumeing software raid here because you never said anything about a raid controller). Set them up lilke this: raiddev /dev/md0 raid-level 1 nr-raid-disks 2 nr-spare-disks 0 chunk-size 4 persistent-superblock 1 device /dev/hda3 raid-disk 0 device /dev/hdc3 raid-disk 1 Note that the device upon which you will allocate / (root) and, is /dev/md0 and there need not be any such thing as /dev/md1. /dev/md0 is the raid array (mirrored drives in this case). Just let everything except /boot and /swap sit as subdirectories of / on /dev/md0. There's no point in breaking that up any smaller. One point: Why is the second partition used for the raid on /dev/hdc instead of /dev/hdb ??? Because you should NEVER put any drives of a raid array on the same controller. But I spoze you found that in the manuals. I've been useing this structure for 3 years now and its very reliable and quite fast. I use reiserfs for the partitions within the raid array. -- _____________________________________ John Andersen
On Saturday 18 October 2003 11:10 pm, John Andersen wrote:
I think you're makeing this WAY too hard by trying to micromanage the partitioning.
Thanks for these suggestions - I'll follow them when I do the reinstall. In the meantime, I think the problem is actually the fact that I told the BIOS that there were no drives in the PC, so that Linux could access the 80Gb, since the BIOS is too old to do that. But of course, the bootloader needs to be visible to the BIOS somewhere, and it thinks there is no hard disk in the PC, therefore it won't boot. I assume ... So the three options would be: - use an IDE controller card - upgrade the BIOS - install a smaller drive purely for the boot process If my reasoning here is wrong, I'd be grateful for comments from people. -- Best wishes Kevin Donnelly www.kyfieithu.co.uk - Meddalwedd Rydd yn Gymraeg
The 03.10.20 at 15:07, Kevin Donnelly wrote:
since the BIOS is too old to do that. But of course, the bootloader needs to be visible to the BIOS somewhere, and it thinks there is no hard disk in the PC, therefore it won't boot. I assume ...
Right.
So the three options would be: - use an IDE controller card - upgrade the BIOS - install a smaller drive purely for the boot process
Or simply a floppy.
If my reasoning here is wrong, I'd be grateful for comments from people.
I installed a 2Gb (yes, two) on an old 386SX-20 which originally came with a 82 Megabyte hard disk. It is so old (1991) that it doesn't do detection, I had to enter head/side/sector count manually in the Bios - but it works! Dos only can use the first 502 Mb, but linux was happy to partition and install on the rest. So... perhaps you can do something similar. You only need a /boot partition where the bios can see it, then use the rest of the disk for linux. -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson
participants (3)
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Carlos E. R.
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John Andersen
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Kevin Donnelly