[ILUG] Soft Raid - Hard Controllers

[Conor Daly]

On Sun, Jul 01, 2007 at 04:12:57PM +0100 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
Patrick O'Connor thought:
>
> The bios will just see multiple hard drives. What I normally do for a
> RAID 1 setup is create a boot partition on 1 hard drive with a swap of
> the equivalent size on the other. Then I configure linux raid to use
> the remaining space on the hard drives to create a root partition.
> (This example assumes both hard disks are the same size).
> I've never created linux raid volumes for a bootable volume but I
> would assume that the bios would just see the boot loader on the disk
> you have configured as the boot disk. The fact that it is part of a
> linux raid volume should not matter to the bios.
> NOTE: This is an assumption, do some googling for confirmation fo this.

Back in the LILO days, using RH 7.2, I set up a boot from RAID1 system.
Since the disks underlying an ext2/3 RAID1 array are standard ext
filesystems, I set up LILO on each MBR to boot from the kernel stored on
that disk.  Once the kernel booted, it would detect the RAID array and
continue from that.

> >> The controller-card Dying.
> Depends on the RAID you are using. I mainly use RAID 1 and I have
> often removed a drive and mounted it as ext3 (or whatever) and it
> reads perfectly.

I take it you mean software raid here?  RAID 1 is just mirroring of
standard filesystems so you can run off either disk standalone.

Conor
-- 
Conor Daly <conor.daly at cod.homelinux.org>
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