Re: RAID 5 questions (software)
On Thu, July 7, 2005 11:11 am, Andy Smith said:
>> If the first hard drive crashes how do you recover?
>
> You restore from backups or do a new install.
>
There has got to be a better solution than that. I never want to consider
my backups to be a first line of defense against hardware failure. I
would definately create a step by step disaster recovery guide for debian
software raid and make it available if anybody would find it interesting.
It seems that there are many methods to set up a raid, however no one has
a method to repair a raid.
Sources used:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO-5.html
debian mailing list
In that spirit I have set up the following:
Debian 3.1r0a
IDE 1-4 each with a 2 GB and a 38 GB RAID configured using Debian software
RAID tool
RAID 1 = 2 GB ext3 /boot (from disks 1 & 3)
RAID 1 = 2 GB swap (from disks 2 & 4)
RAID 5 = 114 GB ext3 / (from disks 1,2,3,4)
Results:
If I replace hard drive 1 I am unable to boot. Using the grub boot disk
and pointing at hd 2,0 generates the following messages:
md2 No spare disk to reconstruct array! continuing in degraded mode
EXT3-fs: unable to read superblock
pivot_root: No such file or directory
/sbin/init: 432: cannot open dev/console: No such file
Kernel panic: Attempted to kill init!
How do I get the OS to recognize the spare disk now, after the failure?
If the RAID 1 was truly working would it have not booted? Is there
another setting on my boot floppy that would help here?
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