Jim Flanagan wrote:
So you are using MD Raid (Linux Raid). This is different than the "bios" raid that David mentioned. In your case you don't need to set anything in the bios for this to work properly.
You didn't mention what Raid level you are using, but from your drive info it looks like you are stetting up a Mirror on two partitions. This is what I did. There was much debate on this list (and many others that I googled over it) about putting swap on the mirror raid, but I wound up putting it on MD raid and it works well. The only thing about this is you will have to disable "resume" for swap to work. MD raid will not handle swap with "resume"at present, you have to set "noresume". (You will loose the ability to put your system in standby. Not an issue on my install). You could put swap on a non MD raid partition, but for the sake of ease of replacing a drive should one fail, I put it on the MD raid.
I put all partitions of this install on MD raid, similar to yours, but I had a problem with /boot not working if it was on an extended partition. The only way I could get it to work was to make a primary partition for boot (two actually, 1 on each drive, the same size - make the partition first, format it with MD raid later). Then I made an extended partition to for all the other partitions. Then I set up each MD raid, boot on the primary partition, all the rest including swap on the separate extended partitions and all has been working well.
I'm not sure if you have the option to make /boot on a primary, or at least a logical partition or not. Hope this helps.
Jim F
I agree Jim that sw raid doesn't need anything to be set in the bios, but if the fake raid *has* been configured, then it will need to be set as bootable on some boards or the boards will refuse to boot from those drives at all. My Gigabyte 7N400 is a perfect example of that. In the bios, you have a Promise (or nVidia) Raid utility that selects the drives included in the array, provides a hardware rebuild function, and determines whether the raid array is bootable or not. This may not apply to Michael's case, but if his board offered any raid function, even the windows fake raid, and he set the array up in the bios, the in some cases he *will* have to set that as bootable before the bios will pass control to the array to boot. 2 out of 3 of the last 3 raid 1 systems I set up were like that. Configuring the bios raid does have a benefit. The benefit of configuring the fake raid is that it tests the array before boot, and provides a hardware rebuild in case one drive fails. In the case of a drive failure, you just install a new drive, and it is rebuilt before you ever hit the first boot in Linux. Just a couple of observations from person experience in building 3 raid 1 systems on 10.3 since January. May not apply, but may help. -- David C. Rankin, J.D., P.E. Rankin Law Firm, PLLC 510 Ochiltree Street Nacogdoches, Texas 75961 Telephone: (936) 715-9333 Facsimile: (936) 715-9339 www.rankinlawfirm.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org