On Thu, Jul 07, 2005 at 10:53:34AM -0500, Michael Martinell wrote: > I have been experiementing with the RAID stuff in Debian 3.1r0a > > In this experiment I configured as follows: > 1st Hard Drive > /boot 400mb > swap 2GB > partition for Raid volume 37 GB > > 2nd - 4th HD > partition for Raid volume 37 GB. [...] > If the first hard drive crashes how do you recover? You restore from backups or do a new install. > I pulled it out, put > in a brand new drive, inserted my boot floppy, and of course had no kernel > to boot. Is there a way to set it up so that I could have a back up boot > sector on the other hard drives? On a regular hardware raid system I > would have set up raid 1 for my boot disks and raid 5 for my data disks. > Since I am limited to just 4 hard drives I obviously can't do that here. Why? Put a partition for /boot, swap and RAID5 on every disk then do RAID1 across the /boot and swap partitions. A 4-way mirror is a bit excessive so you could just put /boot on two of them and swap on another two. As long as the partitions you want to put into a RAID1 or RAID5 are the same size there will be no issues with Linux software RAID. Also consider RAID10 rather than RAID5 if you can spare the disk space; it has better performance and better redundancy.
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