LinuxQuestions.org - SCSI RAID 1 in Slackware on IBM eServer xSeries 330

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SCSI RAID 1 in Slackware on IBM eServer xSeries 330

Okay, me and my friend has been scouting the forums for a few hours for topics that might help us setting up RAID 1 within Slackware 10.0 on a IBM eServer xSeries 330 with SCSI disks.

The server is a "pizza" server and has adaptec SCSI and RAID controller installed, but we can't get it to work.
We've partionally followed the "Linux-SOFTWARE-RAID-HOWTO" but without any success. Ended up with a lot of 99's when we tried to boot.

We are totally newbies with RAID in linux, (windows as well :P), but we've learned a lot today when trying to get it working :)

Anyway, what do we have to do to get it spinning?
We've come so far that we have mirrored the /dev/sda disk, so the /dev/sdb disk is an exact copy of the /dev/sda, we've set up a raidtab file with the settings:

Code:

raiddev /dev/md0

raid-level            1

nr-raid-disks        2

nr-spare-disks        0

chunk-size            4

persistant-superblock 1

device /dev/sda

raid-disk            0

device /dev/sdb

raid-disk            1

So what have we done wrong? And what do we have do to get the old boot back?
I think we have "hardware" RAID support? So why should we be installing and configuring a software RAID solution?

Thanks for any help, and we hope that the data attached with this post will do, otherwise you have to tell us what to tell you :) And we'll try to post the required data asap.

Thanks in advance.

What RAID controller are you using? I have the Compaq Smart - 2DH which supports about any RAID available.. hardware only.
I would HIGHLY suggest you setup hardware raid as there is nothing to do in Linux..
Most RAID controllers have a BIOS (CTRL-A for Adaptec or built-into the F10 utils on my Compaq Proliant) where you can set which drives are to be included and what level of RAID..

RAID 0 = Disk striping without parity
RAID 1 = Mirroring 2 drives (2 diff scsi controllers.. is also optional)
RAID 2 = rare
RAID 3 = rare
RAID 4 = Block-level striping with dedicated parity
RAID 5 = Block-level striping with distributed parity

I'm sure you've read this somewhere so the only thing I would add is if you can, go hardware.
There is little to no overhead and it won't tax your CPU ..
Mirroring won't have much overhead to start with, but hardware is better as it has a dedicated CPU just for that task.

RAID controller..... software raid ? hmmmmm.......
How about maybe.......
/dev/sda?
dev/sdb?
Where ? is the partition number. See if that works.

I don't know anything about xSeries 330, but if it has two HD controllers, you should put one drive on seperate controllers. /dev/sda - /dev/sdc. If you have only one controller, you're right.

If your RAID controller is supported, do as Oderus suggested. Check the docs on the CD for what Slackware supports.

If you want to go software RAID, here's something that might help.
http://slacksite.com/slackware/raid.html