Re: lilo + raid = disaster (again)
hi ya antony
On Fri, 26 Mar 2004, Antony Gelberg wrote:
> Ok, this is very annoying. I was converting a server to RAID-1. The
> drives are SATA and use the siimage driver. They are hda and hdc.
>
> I had a nice Woody system up and running on hda. I created /dev/md0
> with hdc, and a missing drive.
"missing disk installs" always leads to too many problems ... the extreme
hard way to do things
10x - 100x cheaper in time and $$$ to just get a temporary
3rd disk and copy the files to it ... and use the real
hda and hdc as if its was its first time install
just a couple minutes to just build /dev/md0 and all its
partitions
> I did a cp -ax to copy everything on hda
> to md0.
how did you create /dev/md0 ( with the missing disks ) ??
raid2 stop ; raid2 start ??
raidstop /dev/md0 ; raidstart /dev/md0 ??
mdadd ??
mdadm ??
...
before copying the files ...
- how did you confirm /dev/md0 was working
- cat /proc/mdstat will be a good start ...
and should say "resyncing" when its raiding its files
what is the partition type
fdisk -l /dev/hda
fdisk -l /dev/hdc
should all be "fd" type .. NOT "83" ( linux )
> All I needed was to get the boot loader sorted. I put boot=/dev/md0 and
> root=/dev/md0 in lilo.conf, and changed fstab to mount / on md0.
so far so good ..
you probably have additional errors someplace
> Lilo
> came back with some errors. Unfortunately I don't have them to hand,
> but it was something like the boot map not being on the root device
> (this is vague, sorry).
>
> So I tried lilo -M /dev/hda and then /dev/hdc.
you cannot run lilo on each individual disks if you expect to boot
off and run off that raid device
> This is where it goes a
> bit fuzzy. On reboot, I only got the dreaded LI. I unplugged hda, and
> hdc came up with lots of 01 (or something) repeated.
that is expected due yto your incorrect lilo usage
at this point... you have to boot off a standalone root/boot cdrom or
floppy with raid support
- rebuild /dev/md0
- create a correct lilo.conf file
( boot=/dev/md0 ... root=/dev/md0 )
- rerun lilo or grub
> I need to install lilo properly. I noticed that the latest d-i contains
> 2.4.25, which has the siimage driver, so I gave it a crack. I could nip
> into the shell and mount the disks, but I could not for the life of me
> get lilo to work. I'd settle for just getting it back on /dev/hda, and
> then actually trying to get the booting RAID set up without shagging it
> all up again. I tried lilo -r /mnt, but it said that -r was an
> unrecognised option.
>
> (I have another box booting off RAID-1, and it doesn't need the
> raid-extra-boot line.)
>
> Any ideas or help would be more appreciated than you might believe.
>
> A
>
> PS d-b folks, please CC me as I'm not subbed.
> PPS I couldn't build a lilo floppy as this box is floppyless.
hopefully you have a cdrom drive
> PPPS Was this problem caused by trying to install lilo on a running
> system with / mounted to hda not md0?
yes
> Put another way, would it work if
> I booted from lilo on hda, mounted / as md0, _then_ ran lilo on md0?
no .. will NOT work
c ya
alvin
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