On 9/15/2011 9:49 AM, Dave Howorth wrote:
Brian K. White wrote:
* I configure /etc/grub.conf to write grub to all drives mbr's or all drives /boot partitions. This way any drive can boot. Normally only one ever does boot, but the point is all about that day that drive is bad.
One of the biggest reasons I do that is so I don't have to partition the real drives at all. I just use the whole raw full drive device in mdadm, no fdisk or anything.
Are those two configurations compatible? Or is it only possible to do one or the other?
(Yes, I recognize that you're talking about evolving practice. I'm just interested to know)
The first paragraph refers to a different kind of set up from the second. For the second, nothing is written to the real drives but mdraid, not even a partition table. Only the usb thumb drive has an mbr, partitions, & /boot filesystem. That's probably not the most useful setup for most because I happen to want one big filesystem and most people probably do not. There are times when I might put a partition table and a single large partition on all the drives, and use that partition on each drive for mdadm. Mostly when for whatever reason I want the setup to be totally creatable from within the normal installer (so, say, a customer or someone else isn't left with some exotic setup they have no hope of maintaining). In that case, it would be possible to write grub to the mbr of each real disk even if /boot is still on the usb drive, and for some problem motherboards that can be a work-around if I can't get them to boot from the usb drive. -- bkw -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org