Yesterday night I felt like learning some new stuff, so I decided to experiment with software RAID and having the root filesystem on a RAID 1 volume. Looked up some information and after some disc juggling decided to go ahead. Installed, rebooted and saw the login prompt, all was good. Then it was time to experiment. I pull out the first disk, system rejects I/O to the dead device and the RAID magic starts happening. Now one thing I was really interested in, was seeing if the system would still boot with only the other disk in place. Well duh it worked perfectly. Put the other disk back in, reassemble the RAID, rebuilding kicks in, all goes well. Hell, you can even switch places of the disks, everything works as expected, system always comes up.
Of course, woke up this morning with an unresistable urge, let's see how this software RAID works in the MS camp. Armed with Windows 2003 Server standard (r)(c)(tm), I install it on the first disk. After it's done I configure the second disk to be a mirror of the first disk. It synchronizes the disks and I can start pulling out disks. I replay the same scenarios I tried with the linux setup. I pull out the first disk, the system warns me and I can continue on working. Then I wanted to see if the system still booted with one disk, so said so done. I reboot the system, however it hangs with a blinking cursor when the system tries to bootstrap. Looks like windows was not smart enough to install a bootloader on the second disk. Very well, I re-insert the first disk, reset the system. Windows boots up, I shortly see the windows logo... *poof* the system reboots. Hmm, that's strange. System reboots, shortly the windows logo *poof* reboot. Hah, I already broke it! I didn't bother trying Safe mode, or recovering using the windows CD, etc... It should have worked like the linux setup. Conclusion: Software RAID works as it should on linux, and is totally b0rked on windows. Moral of the story: If I had tux bear I would kiss it! I used the following stuff for testing this out: * System: Supermicro 6010H http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/1U/6010/SYS-6010H.cfm * Disks: 2 * Maxtor Atlas 15K 18GB http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Maxtor/menuitem.ba88f6d7cf664718376049b291346068/?channelpath=%2Fen_us%2FProducts%2FEnterprise+Storage%2FAtlas+15K+Family%2FAtlas+15K For the disk swapping, I literately pull them out the drive bay. Didn't bother with telling the software first, so that it would be like a *real* disk failure. _______________________________________________ arch mailing list [email protected] http://www.archlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/arch
