I'm just in the process of setting up a Sarge server to be used as a
sort of backup server. The main PATA discs are used to boot the OS
offof software RAID1, with the rest of the disc space used in JBOD
for not-so-important backups. However, I'm having problems getting
the new disc array up and running.
We've put a SATA controller in the box, a cheap-as-chips PCI Adaptec
1210SA which, according to lspci, uses the SIlicon Image SI3112
chipset to provide two SATA channels. Connected to this are two 320GB
drives which I want to turn into a RAID1 array. When the system
booted first, I used mdadm to create the RAID1 array md2 (mdadm
--create /dev/md2 --level=1 --raid-disks=2 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1),
checked /proc/mdstat to wait for the array to finish syncing, and
then formatted it ext3 and mounted it. Everything seemed to work fine
until I rebooted, whereupon the mount failed with the report that it
wasn't a valid ext[2|3] superblock; fsck confirmed this and on
further inspection it seemed that it wasn't a RAID device any more
either.
...and booted with that instead after editing GRUB's menu.lst. The
exact same error occurred, and I'm now at a bit of a loss to explain
what's happening. If I try and mount the discs on their own (i.e.
mount /dev/sdX /mnt/somedir) then they work just fine, so the
hardware works fine - so I'm almost certain it's a problem with
initting the RAID arrays at boot. At the moment I'm just rebuilding
the array to see what happens when I don't try and mount it at boot,
but only after the OS has finished booting, but of course that'll
only be a temporary workaround. If it's any help, here are my fstab
and mdadm.conf's:
pika@zaphod2:~$ cat /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/md1 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/md0 /boot ext2 defaults 0 2
/dev/hdb9 /home ext3 defaults 0 2
/dev/hdb4 /mnt/avj-backup ext3 defaults 0 2
/dev/hda7 /mnt/dcj-backup ext3 defaults 0 2
/dev/hdb8 /tmp ext3 defaults 0 2
/dev/md4 /usr ext3 defaults 0 2
/dev/md3 /var ext3 defaults 0 2
/dev/hdb7 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdc /media/cdrom0 iso9660 ro,user,noauto 0 0
#/dev/md2 /mnt/dcj-archive ext3 defaults 0 2
===============================================
pika@zaphod2:~$ cat /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf
DEVICE partitions
ARRAY /dev/md4 level=raid1 num-devices=2
UUID=b8093124:a6d6f876:a29eecb7:e1b332f3
devices=/dev/hda6,/dev/hdb6
ARRAY /dev/md3 level=raid1 num-devices=2
UUID=1973b0c3:e38869d2:ffef0cde:92048042
devices=/dev/hda5,/dev/hdb5
ARRAY /dev/md2 level=raid1 num-devices=2
UUID=78a3be5a:f0838fe2:4d4ce7ed:3a969954
devices=/dev/sda1,/dev/sdb1
ARRAY /dev/md1 level=raid1 num-devices=2
UUID=51d55d28:3e653dce:631dd682:8dd52a37
devices=/dev/hda2,/dev/hdb2
ARRAY /dev/md0 level=raid1 num-devices=2
UUID=56e09876:a751356e:b86535d0:95091b5b
devices=/dev/hda1,/dev/hdb1
As you can see, most of the important directories are mounted in
software RAID1 on the two PATA discs with unimportant stuff on JBOD,
although of course this shouldn't make any difference. All the usual
dmesg etc. stuff doesn't seem to tell me anything I don't already
know. If anyone has experienced this before or has any pointers as to
how I can troubleshoot it, I'd be much obliged!