Re: new install
On Tue, Apr 18, 2006 at 02:24:43PM +0100, Koen Tavernier wrote:
> I'm going to perform a new install on an Asus motherboard with the
> following sata controllers:
>
> 0000:00:08.0 RAID bus controller: Promise Technology, Inc. PDC20378
> (FastTrak 378/SATA 378) (rev 02)
> 0000:00:0f.0 RAID bus controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VIA VT6420 SATA
> RAID Controller (rev 80)
>
> I have 4 250GB SATA drives which I would like to use in (software) RAID5
> with LVM on top.
>
> I would love to use one of the newer kernels (2.6.15) but earlier
> comments from Lennart Sorensen about sata drives not always being
> recognised in the same order with this particular kernel has frightend
> me a bit. Does this mean that the raid won't assemble properly and I
> won't be able to boot?
Right now, the system which I have with an intel and a promise sata
controller manages to boot 50% of the time. If it fails, I reboot and
it usually works. It really seems to decide to load the sata drivers
randomly (or more like it loads them both at the same time, and
sometimes one finishes loading first, sometimes the other).
initramfs-tools really needs somewhere I can specify to load certain
modules first before letting udev at things. I haven't found such a
place yet, although I haven't looked very hard either.
Of course if your raid consists of drives from all of them, it probably
won't be a problem. My problem is I have a raid1 on each controller,
and the order of my raid devices gets rearranged when the controllers
load in reverse order. raid5 should probably figure it out just fine no
matter what order they are in.
> On that note, is it better to still have a small unraided /boot
> partition to help grub rather than put everything on RAID5?
grub can NOT read raid5. Only raid1. So you don't have a choice. A
small raid1 partition is nice to have for grub.
Len Sorensen
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