Hi,
Did you look at the raid howto at
www.tldp.org
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO.html
I am a complete newbee, but I managed to install a raid0
with Mandrake 10.1 (two sata drives) with Sil3112A controller.
Saying that, it was not that obvious, and I struggled very much
with drakdisk. I had much less problems with the command line.
Saying that I am not sure how the suberblock works
how to get the magic to be correct nor what the reserved space
for the super user is for / can be accessed.
I will post more in the next 2 weeks if I can and/or will edit this
This will include sata HD benchmark raid and non raid
Version for now: very alpha
Patience, coffee, reboot and reboot again to learn
usefull commands (as root):
lshw
fdisk -l ( l for Lima)
cat /etc/fstab
cat /etc/mtab
kedit /etc/fstab &
mount -a (mount all)
man mdadm (check you have installed mdadm from the distro)
learn how to use vim or vi command line editor
(this will be usefull if the boot stops without the graphics interface
and you need to edit fstab to change the mount option of the
raid or one of its drive from 1 2 to 0 0 )
My howto for mandrake 10.1:
- check 2 available single drives and benchmark if possible (tiobench or bonnie?)
- check HD controller support raid0 or 1
- backup main HD (optional)
- backup fstab (optional)
- configure chunk size and raid set in bios of controller card (not 100% sure it is absolutely needed)
- login as root in a terminal
- use drakedisk to individually format the 2 raid HD (format and type as ext 3 journalised)
do not give a mount point - do not partition as linux raid (need to check this)
(you may be able to skip this) using linux raid caused me problens
- back to terminal check with fdisk -l that HDs are here
- edit fstab or unmount the 2 drives that are to be put in the raid array
- create array with mdam build option and call array say /dev/md0
here again come the chunk size, I understand 32k would be best to
avoid all files to start on the first HD?
- possibly partition raid array with fdisk or other
- definetely format /dev/md0 with mke2fs I think it is called
see the suggestion in the tldp howto. I think ext 3 would be ok
- now mount dev/md0 on /myarray
This may be an edit fstab job (last line?) with something of the like
/dev/md0 /myarray ext3 auto,users,suid,nodev 1 2
or whatever you know is ok, 1 2 might be a problem if like me something
is not quite right in the partition/journal/superblock
- do a mdadm examine option
- with konqueror check the level of access to /myarray for various users
check you can write to arrea
- write in /etc a mdadm.conf file
Let make this a better howto with others experience
Looking forward to comments
