[techtalk] Problems booting from RAID

[Jane Dawson]

Hi,

I am tearing my hair out over this stuff (I should have mentioned that I am
completely new to not only RAID but Linux in general).  This is the first
task I have been given in my new job - talk about being thrown in at the
deep end! :)

I've written to many lists for help with this and received various
conflicting advice and suggestions (many thanks to those who have written
back so far!) So, I've decided the best plan of action is to start again
from scratch with blank hard disks, a new reinstallation and to copy the
setup as described in Boot + Root + Raid + Lilo HOWTO - however I don't
understand how to create a /boot partition as well as a root partition.

I would be eternally grateful if somebody could explain the logic behind
this as well as how to do it :)

Thanks in advance from a poor, confused and befuddled newbie,

Janie

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Magni Onsoien [mailto:magnio at pvv.ntnu.no]
> Sent: 07 August 2000 11:36
> To: Jane Dawson
> Cc: techtalk at linuxchix.org
> Subject: Re: [techtalk] Problems booting from RAID
>
>
> Jane Dawson:
> > I decided to set up a completely RAID-based system using two
> identical IDE
> > hard disks, each with 3 partitions (boot, swap and data).
> >
> > The setup is
> >
> > hda1 and hdc1 = 800Mb boot
> > hda2 and hdc2 = 128Mb swap
> > hda3 and hdc3 = 3Gb data
> >
> > I'm using kernel 2.4.0-test5 with Ingo's 'dangerous' raidtools and have
> > successfully managed to get the data partitions running in RAID-1 as
> > /dev/md2.
> >
> > Great :)
> >
> > But I am having appalling problems in getting the machine to boot from
> > RAID! I've been through the Software-RAID-HOWTO so many times I
> can almost
> > recite it, but still things aren't going as they should.
> >
> > Does anyone have any pointers as to where I'm going wrong? At
> the moment,
> > all six paritions are set in 'cfdisk' to type 'fd'. What should I put in
> > lilo.conf, etc. ?
> >
> > Any help / common problems would be most appreciated because
> this thing is
> > driving me crazy!
>
> Could you post your lilo.conf? What version of LILO are you using?
>
> I installed RH6.2 on one IDE-disk last week, then "upgraded" to RAID-1
> with another disk afterwords. I mostly followed Boot+Root+Raid-HOWTO
> about how to move stuff around and marking disks as failed/working etc.
>
> I then sat 'boot = /dev/md0' (which is my root-partition) in lilo.conf
> and then using /dev/md0 as root-partition further down in lilo.conf (if
> you have a separate /boot-partition, you should use that device in the
> "boot =" statement, and whereever your rootfilesystem is in the
> root-statement for the image.
>
> It is very important that you make a initrd (with mkinitrd) so the
> kernel know the RAID-modules if you compiled them as modules. I used
> mkinitrd --with=raid1 initrd-2.2.16 2.2.16 to make a suitable initrd.
>
> I then ran /sbin/lilo as usual and booted. You MUST have a new
> lilo-version with some patches applied (read the above HOWTO + the
> Software-RAID-HOWTO), but if you have RedHat 6.2 (or a similar system
> where RH6.2-RPMs can be used, I guess) the patches are already applied
> (the kernel also contains RAID-patches). This is LILO version 21.
>
>
> Magni :)
> --
> ulimit is good for you.
>