Re: RAID

["nate" <debian-user@aphroland.org>]

<quote who="Cameron Kerr">

> mdadd complains about the individual partitions, saying that the
> device does not exist (_not_ `no such file or directory', that's
> simple to fix).


my experience with software raid5 on linux (2.2.19+raid 0.90
patches) is that raid5 seems to require the ENTIRE disk. only
1 partition, and you cannot make partitions of the array
(e.g. /dev/md0p1) even though fdisk allows you do, there aren't
the major/minors to format them(/dev entries).

i only have 1 system in software raid 5 and it looks like:

raiddev /dev/md0
raid-level	5
nr-raid-disks	4
nr-spare-disks	0
persistent-superblock 1
parity-algorithm	left-symmetric
chunk-size	32
device		/dev/sdb5
raid-disk	0
device		/dev/sdc5
raid-disk	1
device		/dev/sdd5
raid-disk	2
device		/dev/sde5
raid-disk	3


i tried several times to get it to partition but it did
not come out right, so i gave up and just gave it the whole
disks. i had to install another disk for my swap partition.

this is contrary to raid0 and raid1 which i have used
several times and work fine with partitions.

so, I have 1 26GB / partition(/dev/md0) and my /boot
partition is on the other disk (/dev/sda). as is my
swap partition(1.1GB swap partition).

thats my experience ....

nate