I have a linux box consisting of a primary Opensuse 11 distro, but with other linux distros and also a windows XP bootable partition.

At present I have a 1Tb drive that has 1 largish partition for windows, and 4 10G partitions for each of the 4 distro's root partitions.
All other filesystems (home data etc) for any of the linux distros come from a large lvm volume.

Hope this makes sense so far. All is well but I now have so much data I really want to mirror stuff and have ordered another drive. I dont have mirroring available at BIOS level so I guess I'm going to have to mirror with LVM. I'm not overly fussed about having the windows partition mirrored.

Now I can fairly easily manage to convert the various existing lvm data partitions to be mirrored.

But I'm not sure how to setup/structure the drive so I can mirror all the root partitions for the various distros. Despite reading about a bit, I'm also still a bit baffled about whether I can have a mirrored boot partition? Can I convert existing installations to be mirroed, or am I looking at a reinstall of them all?

Has anyone else got a similar multiple distro mirrored setup the could share with me. Or have any idea how best to approach this?

Thanks

Hi,

I didn't quite understand your setup but I can tell you that a mirrored root is possible and can be setup without reinstalling the systems.

Simply create the same partitions you have on your original disk to the new disk, setup a RAID 1 and make it degraded. Then you should be able to reboot and sync the original disk with the new.

Don't forget to install grub on the MBR of the new disk so that it can boot in case of trouble with the original disk.

Hope this helps a bit.

Thanks eco,
I dont think I helped myself with my original questions, as I wasn't aware that linux RAID and LVM2 were different things entirely. I thought the mirroring was done in lvm2.

Anyway, lets start again:
Lets forget windows and say I want 3 linux distros mirroring.

Currently I have:
/dev/sda1 - suse root
/dev/sda2 - swap
/dev/sda3 - fedora root
/dev/sda4 - ubuntu root
/dev/sda5 - lvm for data areas

My grub loader is installed automatically by ubuntu (installed last) and it picks up the other distros automatically.

What would I do with mirroring. Am I correct in saying I would need a seperate /boot partition if it was raided? Would I need a seperate /boot partition for each distro or just a single one - presumably this would get overwritten every time I installed another distro?

I've looked at and played about with varios howto's, but none of them quite seem to match my requirements.

Thanks

I'm not quite sure what you think you mean by mirroring..
However, the /boot for Linux can only be on RAID1 (aka mirror) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID#Standard_levels if you want to raid it.
RAID basically gives you ways of making more resilient disksets that look like 1 disk to the filesystem.
LVM2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LVM2, http://sourceware.org/lvm2/ allows you to group multiple disks into one large diskset (aka volumegroup) that you can then split arbitrarily into Logical Volumes and then put a filesystem on top of each LV.
These 2 are not the same thing.
Note that you can RAID disks together, then put LVM on top, then split into LVs and put filesystems on top.
Your choice.
I suggest you have a good read and then come back with a design.