On Sun, 2002-09-29 at 22:43, Bruno Prior wrote:
>  > Basically I've got a ASUS A7V133 RAID m/b with 1G ram, althon 1500XP and
>  > two 40G
>  > 7200rpm disks. One disk on the main  controller, the other on the
>  > onboard promise controller.
>  >
>  > Booted mandrake 9.0 disk #1, partitioned as follows:
>  >
>  > /dev/hda1    256M    -    /boot [ext2]
>  > /dev/hda2    24G    -    added to md0
>  > /dev/hda3    1G        swap
>  > /dev/hds4    reat    -    addes to md1
>  >
>  > /dev/hde1    256M    -    /tmp [reiserfs]
>  > /dev/hde2    24G    -    added to md0
>  > /dev/hde3    1G        swap
>  > /dev/hde4    reat    -    addes to md1
>  >
>  > md0 is mode 0    /
>  > md1 is mode 1    /home
>  >
>  > Installed mandrake, went fine, rebooted, failed !

<Snip incredibly long instructions>

When I did an MDK 9.0 install that resembled this (ext3 /boot, RAID-0 /,
/usr, /usr/local, /var/, and /tmp -- yes, performance is critical), the
system failed to come up after rebooting b/c the raid0 module was not
included in the initrd and/or not loaded by the initrd's linuxrc script
therefore / couldn't be mounted. I believe this is a simple fix that
involves checking to see if / is a software RAID volume, including the
correct module in the initrd, and loading it in the initrd's linuxrc. I
will submit a patch if someone can tell me if this is part of mdkinst or
mkinitrd that is broken.

Also, the diskdrake that comes with 9.0 seems to have some issues with
software RAID as well: in order to get my server up and running, I first
installed w/ an ext3 /boot and a just big enough ext3 /. Then after a
successful reboot, I fired up diskdrake and proceeded to create software
RAID partitions and then volumes. When it successfully created all my
mount points and moved the files (all except / -- non-RAID-0 performance
is fine), and I exited, diskdrake saved my changes and recommended I
reboot. Upon doing so, none of the software RAID volumes came up -- they
all had invalid superblocks (but *were* recognized as Linux software
RAID autodetect partitions), and my system was useless (had to
reinstall). This leads me to believe that diskdrake never actually ran
mkraid on the new volumes, just raidstart. I will poke around diskdrake
this week if I get a chance to see if that is true.

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