On 05/19/2010 12:04 PM, Gary Stainburn wrote: > Hi folks, > > I've got a PC with 5x500GB HDD's running software raid. On drive 0 and 1 I > had RAID0 for the boot partition and then on all 5 drives I had RAID 5 for > everything else. Why use RAID0 for the boot partition? That means that a failure of either drive will make the system unbootable (since half the file system needed for booting is on the dead device). I tend to use RAID1 for boot devices, RAID5 for general storage (where I either don't care too much about write performance or expect a low level of write I/O). I would only use RAID0 for transient data that can be easily regenerated after a hardware failure (or combine it with RAID1 if you need to combine redundancy with better write performance but make sure you understand the way that different stackings behave[1]). > One of the first two drives has died causing the PC to hang, and then when I > rebooted it couldn't get past GRUB. I have found out which drive it is and > disconnected it. It then got past GRUB, loaded the kernel which then paniced > and hung. If the boot file system was really stored on a RAID0 device one side of which is now absent then it is possible that we are loading a broken vmlinuz or initrd (initramfs) image from the surviving disk. > I have tried booting using a FC11 install DVD (I believe the dead PC is either > FC9 or FC10) and going into rescue mode but it says that there are no Linux > partitions and doesn't go any further. You might need to activate the arrays manually depending on how they were configured. > Going into fdisk for each drive (with the dead one still disconnected) shows > the partition tables. > > in theory, this system should still be bootable, can anyone suggest things to > try to get it working again. I'm not sure I agree if you had /boot on a RAID0. Regards, Bryn. -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
