Re: Does anyone have software RAID 1 mirroring of / set up on Sparc?
On Tue, 4 Apr 2006 23:11:13 +0100, Ashley Hooper wrote:
> > It is quite tricky to get right. You might find this old post (about
> > setting up Sarge with root on RAID-1 on my Netra) helpful:
> >
> > http://lists.debian.org/debian-sparc/2005/07/msg00143.html
>
> I tried something along the lines of what you advised, but can you
> confirm that you have to create your 1st partition (in my case /boot)
> starting at cylinder 1? I am unable to boot the system without doing a
> 'boot disk0:x' (where x is the partition containing /boot).
If it's going to be part of a RAID set (rather than, say, containing n
ext3 filesystem) then the first partition needs to start at cylinder 1.
This is because RAID uses the whole partition (and hence the bit at the
start of the disk that the boot loader would normally inhabit).
> When trying a straight 'boot' (i.e. boot disk0) I get the error message
> 'The file just loaded does not appear to be executable'.
Hmm, 'something along the lines of' might not be enough. ;-) SILO can be
quite picky in subtle ways. Did you do the throw-away installation on a
completely separate partition, and create both halves of your RAID-1
mirrors (root and /boot) before re-running SILO?
Also, it's a long time since I did this, but I think 'boot' gets
interpreted as something like 'boot disk0:1', which isn't what you want.
You need 'boot disk0:3' (partition 3 is the 'Whole disk' partition,
which always starts at cylinder 0).
> Also, the Silo docs say for the -t option:
>
> "Stores the boot block into the same partition as the second stage
> loader. By default, when using a SCSI or an IDE disk, SILO writes the
> boot block into the master boot (the boot block of the partition
> starting at cylinder 0). This behaviour can be changed with the "-t"
> argument."
>
> Of course, I don't have any partition starting at cylinder 0.
Well, partition 3 (Whole disk) starts at cylinder 0. Anyway, the order I
did things in meant that I didn't need any command line arguments when
running SILO.
S.
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