RAID/LVM Root Filesystem on SuSE8.2

[David Bandel]

On Wed, 9 Feb 2005 14:00:36 -0800, Bill Campbell
<linux-sxs at celestial.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 09, 2005, David Bandel wrote:
> >On Wed, 9 Feb 2005 10:20:51 -0600, Mike Reinehr <cmr at amsent.com> wrote:
> >> David,
> >>
> >> Would you mind providing us with a link to your how-to? I remember reading one
> >> about converting a running system some time ago, but can't seem to find it
> >> this morning, and I'm not sure if that was yours or not.
> >
> >http://www.linux-sxs.org/hardware/raid_for_idiots.html
> >
> >Now I haven't tried other than raid1 and for /boot see no reason.  I
> >also don't use GRUB (which, as I understand, doesn't play nice with
> >RAID, not sure about LVM).
> 
> I've always thought that having the boot/root file system(s) on RAID or
> requiring any non-standard drivers is playing with fire.  The only way I
> would do this is if it's hardware raid that plugs into a standard SCSI
> controller (e.g. the old Mylex externals).
> 

Well, I might agree if I were talking about GRUB.  But with LILO's
understanding of raid, it's no big deal.  In fact, I've already lost a
Maxtor 80Gb hdd (Maxtor must be out to lunch, I've lost a bunch of
their 80Gb hdds this past year) that contained both /boot and /root. 
Were it not for raid, I'd have lost the contents of both (it was a
hard crash).  As it was, I removed hda, replaced with a Hitachi,
reboot (the /boot was on hdc and /root on hde if I remember correctly,
or maybe the reverse), partitioned remembering to make the partitions
equal or greater in size, added the partitions and let mdadm rebuild
all.  Down time (which happened a day after the crash) consisted of
the time it took to shutdown, remove the hard drive and replace with a
new one, then restart the system.  The system ran for a day after
mdadm sent me a note telling me hda was a goner (actually it said md0
and md2 were degraded).

Ciao,

David A. Bandel
-- 
Focus on the dream, not the competition.
            - Nemesis Air Racing Team motto