raid 1 problems fedora core 3 - fsck fails
 

Going a little nuts here.

used:
mdadm --create --level 1 -n2 /dev/md1 /dev/hda2 /dev/hdb2
(both hda2 & hdb2 have ext3 fs on them)
This works fine, eventually copies over everything and /proc/mdstat finds the array. This is going to be mounted as root.

Then, as I did for the /boot partition (which seems to mount fine), I did:
fsck -f /dev/md1
and it eventually finished. Then according to the HOWTO, I ran:
resize2fs /dev/md1
to get the superblock to say the right thing for raid. Everything fine so far, I can mount /dev/md1 no problem (running rescue).
I change lilo.conf to have:
root=/dev/md1
and chroot/lilo, and it tells me it's updating two disks (correct).

But when I reboot, it fails the fsck, complaining about wrong superblock info! This didn't happen with /boot (/dev/md0). I can't figure it out.

Yes, both hda2 and hdb2 (and hda1/hdb1, the /boot partitions) are set to 'fd' in fdisk. They get detected at boot, but the fsck just fails.

Any ideas?

Eric.

Being a Newb myself I can only throw a guess, But I think i remember reading something about the /boot partition not being able to accept a RAID, I set my /boot to /dev/hda1 and on /dev/hdb1 I backup the Kernel info. The other partitions are set up with a RAID1 but the superblock is a special sector (I think, and could very well be wrong) and won't sync with the RAID. The fsck fails because of the inconsistancy between the two parititons super/lack of superblock diff.

Hey, I am having the same problem myself. Its very irritating. Hope someone has an answer. I followed the HOWTO on tldp.org and its just a mess. Tried it like 5 times with some slight variations. If anyone is running a completely mirrored system drive on FC3 please help...

thanks
dave

I did finally get it to work, the key was creating a new initrd. Apparently, the FC3 initrd doesn't have "personality 3" for raid, whatever the hell that is.

mkinitrd --with=raid1 /boot/initrd-.....img `uname -r`

where .... is 2.6.9-1.667 in my case. This I learned *after* having copied the whole system to a spare drive, which I think I wouldn't have needed to do if I had tried this in the first place (could have just done as the rest of the HOWTO says and it would automatically mirror my existing disk over to disk2).

Don't forget to run lilo (I don't use grub) after you make the new initrd if you're a lilo user.

Eric.

also....
 

I'm able to run the /boot partition as raid too, no problems. Here's my df:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/md1 230G 110G 109G 51% /
/dev/md0 99M 9.3M 85M 10% /boot
none 189M 0 189M 0% /dev/shm

and my /proc/mdstat:

Personalities : [raid1]
md1 : active raid1 hdb2[1] hda2[0]
244083456 blocks [2/2] [UU]

md0 : active raid1 hdb1[1] hda1[0]
104320 blocks [2/2] [UU]


and my lilo.conf:

prompt
timeout=20
default=linux
boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
linear

image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.9-1.667
label=linux
initrd=/boot/initrd-2.6.9-1.667.img
read-only
root=/dev/md1
append="hdc=ide-scsi"


Eric.