Re: RAID

[Douglas Allan Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca>]

On Fri, Apr 20, 2007 at 12:44:41PM -0700, John Jason Jordan wrote:
> On Fri, 20 Apr 2007 11:23:59 -0700
> Andrew Sackville-West <andrew@farwestbilliards.com> dijo:
> > On Fri, Apr 20, 2007 at 03:07:49PM -0300, Rogerio wrote:
> > > I want use RAID in Debian, do I have to use the MDADM package?  Is it the
> > > best choice??
> 
> I have installed Etch amd64 on a new computer that I just built. Its
> ultimate purpose is to serve as storage for backups from my other two
> computers, plus to be a way to get on the net when I goober up my Linux
> laptop, which is unfortunately a fairly frequent occurrence. The
> motherboard has onboard RAID 0 and RAID 1 capability, but all my Linux
> friends told me to use Linux software RAID instead, which is what I
> did. Each drive has a 2 GB swap partition and a 50 GB Etch partition,
> assembled as md0 and md1. I wish to use the rest of each disk (250 GB)
> for storage of backups, also as RAID 1.
> 
> I thought I could do this from within Etch, but gparted doesn't grok
> RAID-anything. Just now I tried mdadm and it turns out that it is
> command line only -- scary for a newbie like me! I can use gparted to
> create the ext3 partitions, but since it can't handle RAID, do I have
> to use mdadm to assemble them? Or is there a better tool?

The onboard supposed hardware raid is really a bios program that sets up
windows software raid.  its called fake raid.  Use linux md.

The etch installer will set up software raid.  Use manual partitioning
and read the installation manual.  To further make life sweet you can
put LVM over top of the raid array.

The trick in the installer is instead of telling it to format a
partition, you have to tell it to use the partition for software raid.
After that, there's a new menu choise: setup software raid.

Doug.