bootable failed sw raid 1 with F9

Jeffrey Ross jeff at bubble.org
Sun Jun 15 22:11:49 UTC 2008



Sander Hoentjen wrote:
> On Sun, 2008-06-15 at 11:28 -0700, Brian Tillman wrote:
>   
>> On Jun 15, 2008, at 10:51 AM, Frank Murphy wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> On Sun, 2008-06-15 at 19:43 +0200, Sander Hoentjen wrote:
>>>
>>>       
>>>> Hi list,
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> For the first time in my life i tried to install Fedora with sw
>>>> raid.
>>>>
>>>> See below what went wrong.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Here is what I did:
>>>>
>>>> Start with 2 empty 500GB sata disks.
>>>>
>>>> Make sure nvraid is turned off in my BIOS.
>>>>
>>>> Start an F9 install, creating 2 sw RAID partitions: md0 and md1.
>>>>
>>>> md0 is 100MB and has an ext3 /boot.
>>>>
>>>>         
>>> This could be the blind leading the blind,
>>>
>>> but just raided my centos5.
>>>
>>> and was advised not to raid the /boot.
>>>
>>> as it can get confused as to waht to boot from.
>>>
>>> If you need a backup boot just rsync it to the second drive as
>>>
>>> /boot1 (or similar)
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Frank
>>>
>>>       
>>
>> Although you haven't told us "what went wrong" (IE errors, when in the
>> boot process your system fails ect).
>>
>>     
> Not sure if you are referring to me or Brian, but I did try to tell when
> the errors did occur:
> <quote>
> It starts ok, i even get rhgb for a second and then I see:
> "fsck.ext3: Invalid argument while trying to open /dev/md0"
> </quote>
>   
>> I would highly recommend using raid on your /boot partition, this will
>> enable you to boot should you loose a disk
>>     
>
> This is exactly why i did it like that.
>   
>> I would imagine that you only wrote to the MBR for one of your disks,
>> and your bios is attempting to boot from the other. If this is the
>> case your bios will report "no operating system installed" or
>> something to that effect.
>>     
>
> Again not sure if your reply is to me, but from my email you can read
> this is not the case for me.
>
> Regards,
> Sander
>
>   

As I recall I ran into the same problem, I pulled one of the RAID disks 
out of the system and it would no longer complete the boot up process.

Unfortunately I don't remember exactly what I did but I seem to recall 
the second disk in the system, although a complete raid member wasn't 
set as an "active" drive and as such it couldn't run as a standalone drive.

I do remember having to boot the DVD in rescue mode, dropping down to a 
shell (the rescue DVD wouldn't mount the partition either) and with the 
mdadm command I either had to assemble or just "--run" option with mdadm 
to start the RAID volume (as a degraded RAID array)




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