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From: "Carlos E. R."
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The Saturday 2007-07-07 at 15:02 -0700, Brandon Carl wrote:
I recently installed a IDE RAID card (Syba Ultra ATA IDE card SILO680) in my linux box and mirrored one of my drives (250Gb) to another 250Gb drive. When this was done, I tried to boot into openSUSE 10.2 and it kept stalling at "waiting for /dev/hda1 to appear." I then decided to just try and boot from my original hard drive, and it stalled on "opensuse hangs runaway loop modprobe binfmt-ffff." I thought that was very odd, so I took out the RAID card and tried to just boot from my one hdd, and it worked, thankfully.
Now I am wondering if there is a software alternative to RAID 1 that i can use with my existing hard drive. I have about 100Gb of irreplaceable data under the "/home/spleeyah/" directory, which is on a seperate partition from the "/" directory.
I would like to be able to just copy this drive over to the other one and then set it up as a RAID 1 configuration, but I cannot find any information about how to set this up using Yast or any other tools. I found this tutorial: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO.html but when I try to find "raidtools" in my software management, it doesn't show up. This is an internet installation with my repository set as: ftp://mirrors.kernel.org/opensuse/distribution/10.2/repo/oss/.
I think you got it wrong.
To create a raid 1 setup, first you need to empty disks, or two empty partitions on two disks. Next you create the raid, and finally you copy over the data.
However, if what you have is a lot of important files, it is way safer to have two separate disks (better three disks), and simply copy everything from one to the other, then disconect (and power off) or at least umount the second. Notice that if on a raid setup you delete something or have a bad software crash both mirror copies will be damaged. Raid doesn't protect your valuable data from all mishaps: only a few kinds of mishaps, like some hardware failures.
Ie, a good backup procedure is safer than just raid.
- -- Cheers, Carlos E. R.
I do have two seperate 250Gb drives that I want to be mirrored exactly. I know it's no replacement for backing up data, but that's not what I'm concerned about. This server is not in the coolest of environments, and I have a feeling the old hard drive may give out sometime soon, so I want another hard drive to replace that when it does happen. I think I might have it with the mdadm commands, I'm trying right now. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org