Re: RAID1 netinst CD
Hi,
W. Borgert writes:
> Hello,
>
> today I sat down together with an experienced Linux/UNIX admin and
> we went through the complete installation with RAID1. Unfortunately,
> we didn't succeed. We have two identical HDs and created four
> partitions on each in an identical layout. We sat all(!) partitions
> to type 'FD'. We created the MDs and created three ext3 and one
> swap (all on top of MD). We would like to have XFS, but it was not
> in the menu, but that't not a big issue. Problems:
>
> 1. We were not able to create all MDs from the menu. At the
> beginning, the first partition of the first SCSI disk did not
> appear in the d-i menu. We created all with mdadm.
>
> 2. Deleting MDs from d-i didn't work. The MDs always showed up
> again and again!
yapp, confirmed: menu doesn't, shell does (always?) work
Another option is to zero out the superblocks, or at least the beginning of
a partition with something along the lines of
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdaXX bs=1024 count=64
do not take this command lightly. I did use it intentionally to zero out
the complete disks with of=/dev/sda and no count ... it will run until "no
space left on device".
>
> 3. The installation of the kernel failed completely with sth. like
> /usr/sbin/mkinitrd: Cannot determine root device.
well, this is a completely different game. I have not yet gotten through to
this point. There was an interesting thread on debian-user lately ... //me
searching, here we go:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2004/debian-user-200402/msg05104.html
and references therein.
As a possible workaround: install a small / partition elsewhere (no raid),
reserve space for the read / partition on raid. Install. Now once that
configuration is up, mount the raid /-partition on /new-root, say, copy /
over to /new-root (cp -a), chroot /new-root, mount /proc and stuff in
there. Now try to install a new kernel and see, how that goes in the
chroot-ed environment. I have tried this, but not really come to a
conclusion, of whether this works, should work or cannot work. Consider
this a timeconsuming experiment.
> We tried to disable the first MD (not possible from the menu, but
> mdadm worked), and did / with ext3 and without RAID1, but error
> (3.) still appeared. What's wrong with my setup?
>
> Thanks in advance for any help!
>
> Cheers, WB
You asked: will this be in d-i at some point.
The answer is: if someone creates the neccessary patches.
But in more detail:
- I think its safe to say, it will not be in beta3.
- Keep in mind, that Pauls effort is not yet an official thing.
- so IMHO it will be a while. I know that others are out there waiting for
exactly this: have raid, lvm, devfs, xfs available immediately after
installation.
so, if we help it in: yes.
Not to forget: "Thank you, Paul!" and whatever testing I can do to help,
I'm willing to switch on my "noise machine" any other time ... :-)
(OT: in case you have doubts about the unbelievable noise of a Seagate
Barracuda --- get yourself some :)
Cheers,
Erich
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