The system ran ok for a while but we started to get disk IO errors reporting from one of the drives. It looks like a hardware failure but I am wondering if I may have misconfigured the software RAID which could have caused the IO errors. A setup a single partition but put a SWAP partition on one drive only; I am wondering if this could have been the cause of my disk errors.
No. Setting up swap on only one partition can not cuase disk errors. If you had two disks, you could also have partitioned them identically and have two swap partitions. Another option would be placing swap on RAID 1 too. Placing swap partition on RAID 1 kind of device might slow things down marginally, but it is doable and also gives you some system stability if kernel survives death of disk drive during run time (in my experience, Linux usually hangs if ATA drive fails, so no much use for that anyhow).
[snip]
Most recent kernel updates have not been applied because the boot loader is sat on the disk that failed! The machine has managed to boot from the failed disk but then this drive gets disabled once the kernel has loaded.
I have now got a boot loader onto the other drive and am using a single drive.
Hm, yeah, Grub can be pain in the ass to configure properly for mirrored boot drives. I did it some time ago, and it wasn't preatty. Then I gave up on Grub and switched back to LILO. I find LILO much better for this kind of configuration. It handles mirrored boot partitions automatically and installs itself correctly into MBR of *all* drives that contain sub-mirrors (Grub tends to install only on a drive with first sub-mirror). As I said, this is possible with Grub too, but it is pain in the ass to configure properly, and LILO does the right thing out of the box. So, if you are not into preatty graphics in your boot loader, and you think you can remeber to type /sbin/lilo each time you change lilo.conf, I'd suggest switching to LILO.
WARNING: Kernel Errors Present
Buffer I/O error on device hde, l...: 18 Time(s)
end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector...: 2 Time(s)
end_request: I/O error, dev hde, sector...: 18 Time(s)
hde: dma_intr: error=0x40 { Uncorrect...: 18 Time(s)
hde: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }...: 18
Time(s)
These usually mean your hard drive went south. Get new one from your local PC components store and sledge hammer from your local hardware store. Replace the drive and destroy data on old drive using sledge hammer.
-- Aleksandar Milivojevic <amilivojevic@xxxxxx> Pollard Banknote Limited Systems Administrator 1499 Buffalo Place Tel: (204) 474-2323 ext 276 Winnipeg, MB R3T 1L7
